ABOUT
Not in a "I found a cute restaurant" way. I mean I plan the whole thing — multi-week trips for me and my husband and our three kids, plus my parents and my sister. Eight of us. Everybody shows up at the airport and looks at me.
They don't know where we're staying. They haven't looked at the flights. My dad will ask what we're doing Thursday, I'll tell him, he'll nod, and he'll ask me again Wednesday night. It's fine. They're not being annoying. They just know it's handled.
It's handled because two months earlier I had forty tabs open.
I like doing it. I want to be clear about that, because otherwise this sounds like a complaint.
I like the puzzle part. Like figuring out that if we do the coast on Thursday instead of Tuesday, suddenly the whole week is easier. Or finding the restaurant that's a ten-minute walk from the thing we're already doing instead of a twenty-minute drive across town. Or catching that the museum everyone recommends is closed Mondays, moving it, and nobody ever finding out there was a problem.
That's fun. I'd do that part for free.
It's the other eleven hours I could live without. The spreadsheet that feeds into the other spreadsheet. Checking opening hours three separate times because they changed since I last looked. Doing drive times by hand. Finding one random blog post from 2023 that mentions tickets go on sale sixty days out, so I can set myself a reminder for a date two months away.
But I do it. Because the other option is eight people standing on a sidewalk at 11am arguing about lunch.
01
The first trip I handed everybody a paper day-by-day was the first trip I wasn't the help desk. My mom could just look at Thursday. She knew what shoes to bring, what time we were leaving, whether she needed cash. The plan stopped living in my head.
02
You're going to fall behind. Someone sleeps in. A three-year-old loses it in a parking lot. The aquarium that was supposed to take an hour takes three — and honestly, fine, they were having a great time. The trips that went well were the ones where I'd already written down a second option.
03
They need a day. "Things to do in Costa Rica" does nothing for you when you're outside a rental car place at 7am with three kids and a car seat problem.
And I tried! A couple of times.
It was so hard. Not the research — the part where I didn't know them. Because a good trip isn't a good list of places, it's a list that fits you. Do you want to be up at six or do you want to sleep in. Will your knees do the stairs. Do you want a guide explaining everything or do you want to be left alone. What will your kid actually eat. Who's coming and what do they need and what would they never say out loud.
I don't know any of that. And asking felt like a deposition before we'd even started.
So I wrote it all down instead. My whole process. Every step, every thing I check, every decision I make so automatically I didn't even realize I was making it. I figured I'd just send it to people and they could run it themselves.
Then I read it back and went: nobody is doing this. This is a part-time job. I'd basically written the most boring instruction manual in the world, and the only person who'd ever follow it was me.
Which is when I realized it shouldn't be a document.
TripBaddie is an AI trip planner that takes a few answers about your trip and gives you a real hour-by-hour itinerary — actual places, hours we've verified, links to book.
It's the eleven hours. It asks you the stuff I'd have to ask you, then goes and does the annoying part.
Every place gets checked against live business hours for your actual dates. Not what a model vaguely remembers about when things are usually open.
Totals, dates, distances, ratings, booking windows — if the system can look it up or calculate it, it does. The AI never just writes a number. That's a check in the code, not a good intention.
Passports, visas, vaccines — sourced, linked to the official page, with the date we checked it. If we can't source it, you don't see it.
Addresses, phone numbers, a map for every day. The thing my mom can hold.
Backup options where it matters. And if you get behind, just tell it what happened and it redoes the rest of your day.
Why this neighborhood first. Why lunch there. What the tradeoff was. So if you want to change something, you know what you're messing with.
I'm outside Detroit. Mom of three. Married to my favorite travel buddy.
Before this I spent 15+ years in B2B SaaS — most recently as a COO and Managing Director, so: scaling teams, running P&L, go-to-market, M&A integration. Which sounds unrelated to travel, and mostly is, except for one part. Operations people are the ones who find out what happens when a number is wrong. You develop a thing about checking. That's the part that carried over, and it's why this product won't tell you something it hasn't verified.
Everything in our Trip inspo library came out of the same product you'd use. Same pipeline, same checks. Nothing cleaned up to look better than what you'd actually get.
Answer a few questions. Get the whole trip back, hour by hour.
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