TravelStormer

Do we really know what makes a truly great holiday?

If asked, most people would respond with good company, good times, good weather, duration, organisation (or for some, the lack of it…). These are just a few and sure, they’re all key elements of an enjoyable holiday. But do we really understand what separates the good from the great and the great from the unforgettable? In the end, that’s what it’s all about – those truly unforgettable moments that define our well-earned and often limited time off.

Trying to answer this question is a group of behavioural scientists whose research is aiming to better understand and optimise leisure time.

Cut from the same mould, we at Travelstormer are also trying to optimise people’s leisure time by enriching the trip management and planning experience associated with group travel. Here are 3 tips from a recent article by the Boston Globe* which we view as particularly relevant to all those considering a group holiday:

1. Taking more, shorter trips, may leave you happier than one long one.
   A longer vacation seems, by definition, better than a shorter one. But when we recall an experience, and how it made us feel, it turns out that length isn’t terribly important. In the aggregate, taking more short trips leaves us happier than taking a few long ones. We’re often happier planning a trip than actually taking it.
2. Who you’re with matters as much as where you go.
   Planning a vacation is usually a matter of destinations and activities, but it’s just as important to think about who you’d like to be with. The wrong vacation partner can ruin any trip, and the right one can make where you are seem secondary.
3. Do something you’ve never done before.
   Novel experiences lodge themselves in our memory much more stubbornly than familiar ones. After you get back, your trip will be more vividly remembered if you do something you’ve never done before, rather than rent the same cottage on the Cape.

Other travel related tips pulled from same research;

1. How a trip ends matters more than how it begins
2. Interrupting a vacation can actually make us enjoy it more
3. Force yourself to take the time off in the first place

*SOURCE: Boston Globe Article 1 & Boston Globe Article 2

We’ve been hard at work on updates for Travelstormer.

One of them we’re able to let out of the gate right is a new look, which is one you will definitely notice. While its mostly aesthetic with a few structural changes, we think you’ll find it easier to make your way around and paves the way for other things we have in mind going forward…. Go and log in to take a look!

Since launching last week we’ve had some great response. While we’re busy over here at the HQ, there are a few kind things that have been said about us over on the interweb…

“Travelstormer gives groups a unique forum to discuss ideas, vote on them, and even collect valuable information like flight numbers and expenses (the kind of info that often times gets lost in your email). Rather than just one or a few people arranging a trip, now the whole group can participate and help.” Read more

“…a service specifically tailored to the needs of travelling groups is an extremely useful resource that should appeal particularly to the student travel market.” Read more

“From brainstorming trip ideas to organizing flights, tracking expenses, and tracking the tasks that each group member is expected to complete, Travelstormer can help plan a trip from A to Z.” Read more

“Planning a summertime getaway with 10 of your nearest and dearest has never been so easy thanks to new online startup Travelstormer.” Read more

Thanks a million to those who have covered us, we really appreciate it!

After a fantastic launch yesterday we thought we give a rundown of one of the newest features of Travelstormer – social outsourcing.

While you may want a lot of your trip planning to stay private with your friends, you can’t be expected to know everything about where you’re heading. Enter the public brainstorm.

Making a brainstorm public and posting to Twitter/Facebook gives your friends and followers (limited) access to your trip for collaboration. They can contribute as an outsider by adding their ideas, links and comments, making your reach of inside tips as big as your groups reach on the web (Probably massive).

With our public release fast approaching I thought I’d post one of the major new changes inside Travelstormer.

We always knew that Decision-making was going to be a key feature in a saturated market of travel websites, after all when trying to achieve anything in a group, taking all the heat for bad decisions is no-ones cup of tea…

We started out last year with the concept of Brainstorms, Date Decisions and Polls as separate sections of the site. We have since streamlined this all into one section: Decisions.

From the decisions section you can now specify what type of outcome there is to your question or subject, but even more amazingly (and even magically), you can make questions public and share them with your friends. We’re really excited about this as your group now has the ability to outsource travel queries to an unlimited set of travel-wise friends and followers.

We’ll be updating these changes very soon, if you aren’t part of the private beta, you can sign up here and we’ll get in touch in the next week or so about our public launch.

We’ve had a some interesting discoveries during the closed beta cycle. As well as the feedback we’ve received from other users, trying it out ourselves and observing other trip members use TS has been very exciting/scary. With that in mind I thought we could share a couple of things we’ve learnt.

Flow through a website is hard to understand without actually clicking through web pages. You can make a site with the best features in the world but without a user being guided through the relevant aspects of it, it’s useless. Either that or you write an instruction manual for your website, which I bet someone has actually done at some stage.

Even though it should be a given, and we designed TS with simplicity in mind, it’s the easiest thing in the world to add things you dont need. Particularly in Photoshop where the main mission is to add things to the page. Its only now that everything is alive, so to speak that we now want to kill a few things!

However, we’ve been lucky in a sense that most of these discoveries have been smaller issues, and since we are pretty lean right now these things are easy to change.

Harmonypark is doing a great job with the code, and we are excited about the Expensure integration coming soon along with a full public release.