It must be the week of the travel planning — just as Hipmunk announced a trip planning feature, RoadTrippers is now offering groups a way to collaborative plan trips on its platform.
As one of the most requested features by users, it lands just in time for the busy summer road travel season.
Road trips are perhaps one of the more involved planning processes, given that they usually include more than one person and there are infinite possibilities as far as route, destination and activity.
The new feature, straightforwardly called Collaborative Group Planning, brings together disparate elements of the product into one place for a shared planning experience.
The first step for users is to set a destination to see an estimate for mileage and cost for the trip. Then the user can punch in email addresses for others to participate in the planning process.
These folks can then take on some research and add interesting places from the RoadTrippers database into the trip.
This collaboration feature simplifies the ongoing back-and-forth for road trips, which end up having many stops and competing interests in one vehicle. The updates actually occur in real-time, which is a refreshing way to collaborate that will be familiar to anyone who has jointly edited a Google Doc.
The experience translates onto the mobile app, where the itinerary lives during the trip. RoadTrippers also offers mobile bookings for last-minute stays and keeps the itinerary updated for all travelers.
The launch of this feature keeps users on site while planning trips with friends, reducing the need to find another tool to facilitate the planning phase of that clasicc summer road trip.