May 31, 2024

Product update

Product Update - May 2024

Product Update - May 2024

Craig Phillips

It's been 2 months since launching our alpha version of GatherGo. Our team has been busy building some solid evolutions to the product—both in terms of general usability and bug fixes, to significant new functionality.

Check out all these new features and more by logging in today, and start building your next trip.

Let's get into it.


A big step on booking processing

In April we had a very initial version of our "booking ingest". This was the foundation for how our system—using Artificial Intelligence—takes booking confirmation emails you send us, and surfaces them inside your account.

In May, we've made a big jump forward. Now when you forward a booking email to plan@bookings.gathergo.co, our system will read the email, extract and make sense of all the data within it, bring it into our system, and (here's the kicker) create relevant itinerary items in your plan.

There's a lot going on behind the scenes that allows us to find the right trip to place your booking into (or create a trip if one doesnt exist). And to create individual items for various legs of a journey, or a check in and check out of your lodging.

To try this out, simply take a booking confirmation email (whether a flight, train, hotel, restaurant, event, etc) and forward it to plan@bookings.gathergo.co. After a few seconds you'll see it appear in the app.


Invite participants via an invite link

We got a lot of feedback that inviting participants via email worked, but it wasn't ideal. Not everyone knows the emails of their travel participants. And even if they do, it can be a lot of typing.

And so, this month we released the share link. It's a unique URL that you can generate on your trip detail page. Simply copy it, and share the link. Up to 50 people can join using that link.

So, whether your chatting with a group in WhatsApp or Slack or wherever, send the group the link and watch them pour in. Start building your trip together.



Send a message

Communication between trip participants is something we want to tackle, but want to start small. We know you already have your messaging tools of choice, so we're always thinking about how we can play nicely with those tools.

To start, and in the spirit of starting small, we decided to introduce a send a message feature. It's a one way communication between you and all the participants in your trip. So, if there's something you quickly want to send out to the group, try this one.

So go on, tell all your participants it's time to book their transit. Or communicate something about a trip decision you made. Or maybe just remind them to forward their booking confirmations to plan@bookings.gathergo.co :)



Link accounts

From day 1, we knew we needed to be able to account for personal and professional travel. Sometimes on separate trips, and often on single trips.

But we had a problem. Anyone who had two accounts with separate emails, jumping between them was… a pain.

And so, this month we release account linking. In your profile, you can enter in the email of another account and link it. You'll get an email confirmation to the linked account. After confirming, you're all done. Now you can toggle between accounts.

Smooth as butter.



Mobile UI improvements

Last one is a general one, and connects with our new design approach moving forward. We heard from a lot of you that you want to interact with our tool on mobile. But frankly, mobile was an after thought for alpha.

We changed this. As of this month, everything we design will be mobile-first. Everything we build internally will be demoed in the mobile form factor.

We all know how rare it is for our work tools to be mobile friendly. Well, we are committed to changing that.

This is especially important as we aim to cover not only the planning experience, but the travel experience as well. We know for us to be a truly useful application, you need a good mobile UI to access your trip plan and places while on the move.

Log in on mobile and check it out. We've got a lot to do still, but its already looking much better, and is easier to get around. We'd love to hear what you think, and learn how it can be better!.



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There were a lot of other small improvements and fixes this month, so go on into the app and look around again.

Our team is currently building some exciting new functionality that's going to broaden the possibilities and felxibility around your trip plans. So stay tuned!

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.

And why not jump into the app, play around and plan your next trip.

We're currently in Beta. Try Finch for free! 🚀

We're currently in Beta. Try Finch for free! 🚀

We're currently in Beta. Try Finch for free! 🚀

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