After my successful hunt securing Qatar Airways golden tickets to New Zealand, I found Inspirock and now I want to share it with the world!
Most travel websites and apps out there are so focused on selling something to users that they’re leaving grounds almost untouched the trip planning part.
Inspirock fills that gap perfectly.
A new way to plan and customize your next trip
In their own words, Inspirock is an innovative online trip planner that makes vacation planning fast, fun and easy. Inspirock’s research bot and its planning engine build a detailed, personalized, sightseeing plan for any city, country, or region in the world.
Users can customize this plan, book it, and collaborate with their co-travelers.
I’ve tried it out for two of my upcoming travels, and here’s an overview and my take on it:
Planning
The Planner will ask you your travel style and preferences beforehand, to customize results. You want to take it slow or on the contrary want to check as many things as possible? There’s a speed for everyone.
The Research bot will take your preferences into account and suggest: best places & time to visit, gives you reviews, transportation options and hidden gems.
The Planning engine optimizes your itinerary and helps minimize travel time, checks when attractions are open and also recommends how much time to spend. You can refine your plan and the travelbot will find the best routes and schedules.
And, when your plan is done, it’s all in one place, because they (D’oh!) also allow for booking & organizing your reservations.
Spontaneous or Slow Traveler ? Don’t write it off just yet!
Before you go thinking this one’s not quite for you, you’re just gonna slow travel and discover the surprises in your next destination – don’t write it off just yet!
Inspirock does for a great draft planner as well – I mean, you don’t have to use all of its features if you don’t want / need to.
It works great to give you an idea of all the things you would like, then you can move on to your own wanderlusting.
Wanderlusters who could use this
Affordable customized trips
Personally I think it’d work best for those long distance trips, where you want to explore without booking that standard 2-week long tour that everyone does, but you don’t have the money for those customized tours that cost thousands $$.
With Inspirock, you’ll get the flexibility to customize your travels, choose your own personal style, make the most out of your budget and not have to spend weeks planning!
Group Travels made easy
Another great use is when you do group travels.
A lot of different people, maybe you’re luck and have similar tastes / or not
Maybe you need to plan the trip in a short time, and you’re finding it cumbersome to keep exchanging emails on tweaking plans?
(we’ve all been there, #amirite ?)
What I find really cool about this Inspirock is the collaborative feature, so easy!
Your group members can add or move blocks around in the travel plans, and it’ll be fun instead of of annoying..
The website will build you a personalized plan, complete with day-by-day itinerary based on your own preferences.
Visual planning
The calendar view is particularly cool and makes it really easy to tweak and shuffle things around to adjust your plan just the way you want it.
It’s really so easy to use you’ll be done planning before you know it. Everything in one place and everyone on the same page.
Booking with Inspirock
The website will of course then give you options for booking flights (Skyscanner) hotels, (Tripadvisor) and activities (Viator). But by now they’ve added value to your trip, so why not ?
Flights
I checked out their flights booking engine and compared it to Skyscanner Here’s my comparison search for a round trip (1 stop only) flight Barcelona to Denpasar:
I guess they have an API into Skyscanner, because the prices are exactly the same. Which means : you can confidently book your flight within the planner, knowing you have the best offer out there.
Where to stay
So I decided to play some more, and checked out the Where to stay feature.
This one’s not quite for me, because I mostly use Booking.com and Airbnb
That being said, the search will send you to TripAdvisor, which will pull out a big fat list of all hotels in the area – for the time frame you’ve indicated – sourced from Agoda, Booking and several others.
Overall, and my personal take: I love it!
And while I won’t be using it for all of my travels, I already have 2 plans set up in my Inspirock and it went so smooth and fast I’m actually craving for more planning now!
If you try it out, give me a shout and let me know what you think.
Oh and did I mention the travel world loves them too?
Inspirock was a finalist in the Best Travel Technology Product @ Global Youth Travel Awards 2016 and also winner of the 2016 Brand USA Innovation Marketing Award @Phocuswright
Rock on, Inspirock! Oh, and make an app for it 😉
[…] the planning, even though it’s not an app yet (in the making, I am sure..). See my post on Inspirock trip planner for more on how it works and why it’s so […]