Stop treating your holiday like a data entry job

Planning a trip usually starts out fun. You pick a destination and look at some photos. But then you book your flights, and suddenly you are doing data entry. You have a massive Google Sheet open. Your inbox is full of booking confirmations. You have Google Maps open in another tab to check if your hotel is actually close to the train station. It is a complete mess. A travel planner app should take this off your hands, but most of them just give you another place to type things into manually.

The copy-paste loop

We have all done this painful loop. You get a confirmation email. You copy the booking reference. You paste it into a spreadsheet cell. You open a new tab for your calendar and manually copy the times over. Then you book a tour or a restaurant, and you repeat the exact same process.

It feels like you need a dual monitor setup just to organise a simple getaway.

And the emails keep coming. The airline sends you a flight confirmation, then a separate email with your seat assignment, then another one when they change the gate. The hotel sends a booking confirmation, then a pre-arrival email with different check-in times than what was on the original booking. Every time you get a new email, you have to go back to your spreadsheet and figure out what changed.

Half the time you end up with two versions of the same information and no idea which one is current. You check your spreadsheet at the airport and it says gate B4, but the airline app says gate C12 because you forgot to update the sheet three days ago when they sent you that change notification.

The tab problem

Then there is the research phase. Before you have even booked anything, you are living in your browser. Reddit for restaurant recommendations, Google Maps to check if those restaurants are near your hotel, a travel blog with an itinerary you want to steal ideas from, Skyscanner because you still have not decided between the morning and afternoon flight. You have so many tabs open that Chrome stops showing the favicons and you cannot tell which tab is which anymore.

You spend more mental energy remembering where you saw a particular piece of information than you spend actually making decisions. By Friday evening, you have been at this for three hours and you have made exactly zero decisions about what to do on day two.

It gets worse when other people are involved. Someone sends a link in the group chat. You open it, read it, and then you have to manually transfer whatever was useful into your spreadsheet. Someone else sends a Google Maps pin. Same thing. Every piece of input from every person in the group has to be manually processed by whoever is maintaining the master plan. You are basically a data pipeline with feelings.

Sure, you could use Notion or Google Docs. Some people build elaborate trip planning templates in those. But they still require you to manually type everything in, and they have no concept of what a flight or a hotel or a day schedule actually is. They are general purpose tools being forced into a job they were not designed for.

Forward your emails, skip the spreadsheet

I built ryokko because I was sick of collating arbitrary details across five different apps. It is a trip planner app designed specifically for travel itineraries, and it removes all the tedious copy-pasting.

Instead of manually entering your flight and hotel details, you just forward your reservation emails straight to ryokko. The app handles the data entry for you. It reads the confirmation email, pulls out the relevant details (airline, flight number, departure time, arrival time, booking reference) and puts them in the right place in your itinerary.

When the airline sends you an update, you forward that too. ryokko updates the existing entry instead of creating a duplicate. You do not need to go hunting through your spreadsheet to find the cell that has the old gate number.

This works for hotels, car rentals, tours, restaurant reservations. Anything that sends a confirmation email. The point is that you should never have to manually type in a booking reference or a check-in time. That is what computers are for.

Here is what ryokko does differently from a spreadsheet:

• Forward booking emails and the details get extracted automatically
• Drag and drop places and activities onto a day-by-day schedule
• See everything on an interactive map inside the app
• Works offline on your phone, no wifi needed
• Share your full itinerary with one link, no app download required

Plan with a real map, not a browser tab

When it comes to figuring out what to do, you do not need to bounce back and forth between a spreadsheet and a browser. ryokko lets you use Google Maps directly within the app. You can look up locations, see how far apart things are, and add items straight to your planned schedule.

The interface is actually built for plotting out days and times intuitively. You drag a restaurant from your places library onto Tuesday afternoon, and you can immediately see on the map whether it is near the museum you planned for Tuesday morning. If it is on the other side of the city, you see that too, and you can move things around until the day actually makes sense geographically.

A spreadsheet can tell you that you have a restaurant at 1pm and a museum at 3pm. It cannot tell you that there is a 45 minute train ride between them and you have not left yourself enough time.

Take your travel itinerary anywhere

A spreadsheet is terrible to read on your phone when you are standing in a busy airport or walking down a street with bad reception. ryokko lets you export your finished itinerary as a clean PDF, or you can print a hard copy to keep in your bag.

If you prefer using your phone's native apps, you can push the whole schedule directly to your Google or Apple calendar.

But the bigger thing is that ryokko works offline. Your itinerary is on your device. You do not need wifi to check what time your flight is or where your hotel is. Open the app on the plane, in the taxi, walking through a market. Your plans are there. When you reconnect, everything syncs in the background. We wrote more about why we built ryokko offline-first and what that actually means.

Most travel planner apps assume you have a constant internet connection. That works when you are sitting on your couch at home. It does not work when you are standing in a foreign train station trying to figure out which platform to go to and your data is not loading. I have been in that exact situation more times than I want to admit, and it is the whole reason we made offline the default instead of an afterthought.

A travel planner app should handle the admin

Nobody opens a spreadsheet on a Saturday afternoon because they want to. You do it because you booked a trip and now there are twelve confirmation emails and a group chat full of suggestions and none of it is in one place. The admin is the price of the trip, and it should not be.

ryokko is in active development right now and getting close to an early release. If you want to ditch the spreadsheets and actually enjoy putting your next trip together, drop your email on the waitlist. I will let you know as soon as it is ready.

Read the founder story behind ryokko or find out how to share your trip plan with friends.