Duffel Makes Trip Planning Easy
Today, I’m reviewing trip planning site, Duffel, testing it with a planned trip to Las Vegas next year. Here’s what its creators say:
Duffel is not only a place where you can collaboratively store, organize and archive all these travel ideas and trips, but you can also use them to compile your own itineraries that go hand-in-hand with your favorite travel guidebook.
It literally took a couple of seconds to complete the simple signup, input my desired destination (Duffel provided a drop down list to help me as I typed) and to name my Duffel. Once I’d done that I got a home screen which included a desktop on the right:
- a note with a couple of items I should remember to take with me
- three recommended activities
- three recommended hotels
- and a notepad for transportation
Across the top were tabs where I could add more of these plus a recommendation tab, where I could see activities from Duffel’s partners (this is probably how they make money).
On the left was an itinerary section where I could add my dates and drag and drop activities. After filling in the dates, I started adding details. First, since I knew where I would be staying, I clicked on the Lodging tab and added my hotel details, then deleted all of Duffel’s recommendations from the desktop. I also updated my travel airports on the transport note and dragged that to the first day of my itinerary.
Next, I tried out the Recommendations tab, selecting a number of activities I wanted to add to my itinerary. While I was impressed with the range of activities available, I wasn’t actually able to add any, so instead I had to rely on the bookmarklet which worked much better.
I really liked the easy itinerary view and the fact that you could easily expand the itinerary for more detail on individual items. Duffel also allows you to share your plans with people you invite, to post it to Facebook or Twitter and to add comments.
Heading back to my dashboard, I looked at the Duffels that others had created and there were some amazing ones. I could see how this would be a great tool for planning a group trip or business trip as everyone could put what they planned to do on particular days into the Duffel. It’s also a great tool for planning a family trip as everyone can add their notes and favorite activities very easily.
Duffel provides a nice combination of practical travel planning tools and sharing tools, and I’ll certainly be coming back to it again.
Tags: travel, travel planning, Travel Tools
January 14th, 2010 at 6:50 am
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