Jun 30, 2024
Product update
Craig Phillips
Our team is continuing to deliver this summer, with no signs of slowing down. This past month we introduced a new area to our trips page, called Places. More below about our thinking on it, and what you can do today with Places.
In addition to Places, we've got a bunch of smaller items that we've gotten in this month. We’re just a few weeks from our beta product launch, and with it, some big new things coming in we think you’re going to love.
Check it all out by logging in today and continuing the plan for your next trip.
Let's get into it.
Your saved places
In our very first version of the Plan, we focused on a more chronological mode of planning — thinking in days, and what might happen on each day. Though this mental model works for some, it doesn't for everyone.
This is why we introduced Places.
You may have noticed Places in the app before. At that time, it was simply a view of all your planned blocks that have locations set. So, if you had a hotel check in on day 1, and added the hotel address, this would show up as a place.
A good start, but we wanted to help you add in places—both those you know you'll go to, but also ideas for places you might go.
And so, now you can save a bunch of Places to your trip without even touching the Plan. Or do both by adding a Place, and then clicking “Add to Plan” to add time details and have it show up on your itinerary.
Find places
Finding places to add into your trip can take many forms. From the open ended "where should we have the team dinner", to the pre-defined "my manager said I should book my room here".
Though Find Places today isn't a tool for broad, open ended discovery, we do replicate what would've been your google search. Simply find some places that might work well, and save them into your trip.
With this, your group now has shared visibility on those places you all might be going to. And, you can view those places as cards, or on a map, to help you visualize how getting around the city might actually look.
After you add a Place to your Plan, you’ll see a purple chip on the Place card showing that’s a scheduled item. Or, as we call it, a “Planned place” 🙂
Detail views of bookings, blocks, and places
Previously we showed almost no details of a booking, a block, or a place. This month, we improved them all, so that you have a full detail screen showing all the info we have on them.
Some of these are created by you manually, some through our AI that reads and processes your booking emails, and others through Find Places which searches and gets details from Google.
Best to just go in and check it out. We'd love to know which details would be helpful to you, both in the planning phase, and while you're on a trip.
Bookings creating nicer trips
If you haven't yet forwarded a booking to plans@bookings.gathergo.co, you're really missing out. Our AI assistant reads booking confirmation emails, processes the data, and places them in your itinerary. A little bit of magic.
Though we made strides in May, in June we went a bit further. When you forward a booking to us, but a logical trip doesn't exist to place it in, we create a new one for you. However those trip titles were not looking great. Now we have logic in place to figure out the location, name the trip appropriately, and give it a nice trip image.
It's a little thing, but sometimes the best things come in small packages.
More organized Trips page
Yes, we know. The trips page was a little funky in how it was ordering trips. We now organized this page and classified trips in 3 ways—Current, upcoming, and past. We gave extra emphasis to your current trip, and added a little count-down label to your upcoming trips.
Again, little improvement, but it's really sparking some joy for our early users (us included!).
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As usual, we have a bunch of other small improvements and bug fixes this month, so go on into the app and look around again.
We're getting ready to move our product into beta, with some exciting new functionality that's going to augment nearly all the manual functionality in the app today.
As always, we'd love to hear from you. If you travel for work and are open to sharing some of your experiences with us, please grab a time to speak here.
Or, if your company has a need for a tool like ours, grab a time to speak with us about your travel needs.
And why not jump into the app, play around and plan your next trip.