How A Family Travel Tradition Became An App

This week we are focusing on spring travel, and our first feature is from Justine Pratt of Creative Algorithms. Justine explains the analog days in her family history when the travel log housed everything (including priceless memories) about her family trips. She transports us to modern times with another family endeavor: Trip Boss travel manager.

Back when we were kids, we kept a family travel log book. We recorded a lot of data and a lot of memories in those log books.  Our book was a simple spiral notebook. We kept track of our daily mileage, our daily expenses, our fuel economy, and a journal.  The journal included facts about the weather, what we saw, where we stayed (with comments and ratings) and diary entries from every family member.

Those past logs are golden.  My mom used them to plan the next vacation (we made a lot of cross-country treks from Michigan to Seattle, WA).  We revisited the campgrounds and hotels we liked (and were clean), we estimated how far we could travel each day (based on past experience, recorded in the log), we stopped at old favorites and new sightseeing locations.  Even better, we reflected on journal entries which included trend-speak of the day (one year “Valley Girl” was big), and the sayings and phrases we made up. We treasured the little anecdotes we’d forgotten, and laughed at how horrible our handwriting used to be.

After I married, my husband and I consulted the logs for OUR vacations.  We started our own logs and continued the tradition with our own family.  Before long we started our own business writing mobile apps (first on the Palm Pilot & Treo, now on the iPhone) and needed ideas. Suddenly, Trip Boss travel manager was born – an electronic family travel logbook.  The possibilities were endless!  (The name came from a pet name my mom used to call me—the Trip Boss—I was the ultimate planner and knew my way around a map.)

The app included everything from the logbook: expenses, itinerary info, mileage, fuel economy, a journal, place ratings, and more.  We expanded it to include international travel, with currency conversions and international units.  We added budgeting—now we could know en route if we could afford an impulse side trip or pricey souvenir.  We added packing lists, with templates for repeat use, and to-do-before-we-leave prep lists.  No sense in limiting it to just family travel, we added features to ensure dual usage for Business travel, with expense reports and tracking.

We got especially excited when we started moving the app over to the iPhone—a whole new set of features were possible, starting with get-location to speed up place entries, and photo receipts for easier expenses, not to mention real-time over-the-air currency exchange rates, and much more pleasing graphics.  But we could also offer customization, through in-app purchase, so you could choose only the travel modules you want or need.  The great part about having all the modules in one app is that they can talk to each other.  Book and enter your flight into itinerary, then quickly add the expense.  Visit a museum en route, add an expense and then add an itinerary entry (for future reference). No need to flip between apps during entry or try to piece together the history between multiple apps—it’s all in one convenient location.  Browse through your last trip when planning a new one.  Everything about your trip is all together.

So, now we have Trip Boss travel manager for iPhone, which we use on our family vacations.  Start with the Expense and Budget module (currently available), which includes a Tip Calculator and Currency Converter in the package.  Later add, through in-app purchase, the Itinerary module (due out this month), which includes a Travel Time Calculator for route planning. In the future you will be able to add a journal, expanded mileage log, packing lists, and more (coming soon).  Each is an app-within-an-app and we’re expanding the features to utilize as much mobile goodness as possible.  Trip Boss is the essential family travel log, gone electronic to keep up with today’s modern technology.