Save places from TikTok and Instagram Reels to your travel itinerary
Nowadays, us cool kids scroll through Reels and TikTok to get inspiration for their next travel adventures. You find a cafe in Paris, a beach in the Maldives, a hole in the wall restaurant in Tokyo. You save places from TikTok and Instagram thinking you will look them up later when you plan the trip. But more often than not, they get forgotten about. Your phone turns into a travel wishlist that never gets used.
Why your TikTok travel saves never become real plans
Everyone has a version of this. You are scrolling through TikTok or Instagram and someone posts a video of a cafe in Kyoto with the most beautiful matcha latte you have ever seen. You tap save. You keep scrolling. Two videos later, someone is walking through a night market in Bangkok. Save. A week later, a hidden beach in Bali. Save.
Eventually you have a massive collection of places you genuinely want to visit, but they are buried in a feed you will never revisit. Your saved folder becomes a graveyard. Not because you stopped caring, but because scrolling is easy and planning is hard.
When you actually sit down to plan a trip, you do not think to go back through your saved videos. And when you do, the process is painful. You have to rewatch each one, try to figure out what the place is called from the captions or the comments, Google it, find the address, and then manually add it to whatever spreadsheet or doc you are using. For a single video that takes five minutes. When you have fifty saved videos, it is a full afternoon of work. Most people just give up and plan from scratch.
I know this because I do it too. I have a saved folder on Instagram with probably two hundred travel videos in it. I have used exactly zero of them to plan an actual trip.
The gap between discovering a place and planning to visit it
This is the part that bugs me. Social media is genuinely good at travel discovery. A 30 second video of someone eating street food in Mexico City tells you more about a place than a five paragraph blog post ever could. You can see the vibes, the crowd, the food, the neighbourhood. It is the best way to find places you did not know existed.
But there is no bridge between discovering a place on your phone at 11pm and having that place show up in your travel itinerary two months later when you are actually planning the trip. The two activities happen in completely different contexts, on different apps, at different times. The information dies in the gap.
Every trip planning app I have tried ignores this. They assume you already know where you want to go and what you want to do. They give you a blank itinerary and say “start adding places.” But where do you get those places from? Your bookmarks graveyard on TikTok, apparently, except nobody has made that connection before.
How ryokko will turn saved videos into trip plans
ryokko is building a solution for this. When you find a travel video with a place you want to remember, you will be able to share it directly to ryokko from the native share sheet on your phone. The same way you would share a video to a friend over iMessage or WhatsApp.
ryokko will take that video and extract the places mentioned in it. The cafe name, the address, the location on a map. It will pull out the details so you do not have to rewatch anything or type a single thing. The place gets saved to your trip and shows up in your places library, ready to be scheduled onto a day.
Here is how it will work:
- Find a travel video on TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts
- Tap the share button and choose ryokko
- ryokko extracts the place names and locations from the video
- The places appear in your trip library, pinned on the map
That is the whole flow. You do not have to rewatch anything, google anything, or copy-paste addresses into a spreadsheet.
It will work across platforms
This will not be limited to one app. It will work with Instagram Reels, TikTok videos, and YouTube Shorts. If it is a short form travel video, ryokko will be able to pull the places out of it. You will not need to think about which platform the video is from. Just share it.
We are also thinking about how to handle longer travel vlogs on YouTube. A ten minute video might mention eight different places. The extraction should still work, but the interface needs to let you pick which places you actually want to save rather than dumping all of them into your library. That part is still being designed.
From saved video to planned day
Once a place is in your ryokko library, it works like any other place in the app. You can see it on the map, read the details, and drag it onto a specific day in your itinerary. If you saved a ramen shop from a Tokyo video and a temple from a different video, both show up in your places library and you can schedule them onto the same day if they are close enough geographically.
ryokko is built around this kind of workflow. You collect places over time, from wherever you find them, and then when you sit down to plan, everything is already there. You skip the research phase because you already did it, just in small pieces over the last few months while scrolling on the couch.
Compare this to how it works now. You sit down to plan a trip to Tokyo. You open Google Maps, you open Reddit, you open your saved videos, and you start from zero. Every place is a new search, a new tab, a new entry in the spreadsheet. With ryokko, the places you saved six months ago from a TikTok are already pinned on the map waiting for you. And video import is not the only way places get into your library. You can also add places manually, search Google Maps, or save Google Maps pins that friends send in the group chat.
Stop letting your saved folder collect dust
ryokko is in active development. If you want to turn your saved travel videos into an actual travel itinerary, join the waitlist and be the first to try it.
No more rewatching videos at 11pm trying to remember the name of that restaurant someone posted three weeks ago.
You might also like: how to share your trip plan with friends and what we have been building at ryokko.