Simple trip planning for groups

Woe unto you if you ever have the bright idea of coordinating a group vacation among your friends. Getting everybody to agree on a date, a budget, travel arrangements, and an itinerary can be a full-time job. This is why there are travel agents.

It's also why there's the new site, Triporama. This simple service helps coordinate the details involved in putting a small group trip together: who can go, when, where, and how. At the moment the site has the necessary minimum of functionality--you can set up a mailing list, a few private trip-focused discussion boards, and polls for choosing a date--but it would still be a help in creating a trip. In the future, I imagine a group flight-finder like this experiment could be added, as well as a query engine that hits hotels and local attractions for group availability.

The site also acts as a marketing hub for travel service providers, such as people who rent villas, and excursion guides. You can also find deals on group packages from the providers. Editorial content focuses on good group trip ideas, such as the Moscow Military package. There's no user feedback or rating system for the site's ideas, though.

It looks like a useful little service and a great adjunct to all the sites that help individuals book travel. A service like this could end up as a darling of travel providers. Sponsorships and partnerships with airlines, hotels, safari companies, and such should be easy for Triporama to come by, which means this useful service might be around for a while.

Compare to: Grouptivity [blog post].

(Source: eHub)