If you've ever tried to plan a group trip using WhatsApp, you'll know how quickly it falls apart. Decisions get buried under dozens of messages. Important links disappear into the scroll. Half the group is enthusiastic for a week, then goes quiet. Someone picks a destination and others quietly resent it because they never had a proper say. By the time you actually book something, the experience has already taken the shine off what was supposed to be an exciting trip.
Trips Together was built specifically to solve this problem. It's a dedicated group travel planning app that replaces the group chat chaos with structured tools for making decisions together, building plans collaboratively, and keeping the whole group aligned — from the first "should we go somewhere this year?" conversation all the way through to the final settlement of expenses when you get home.
Here's a full walkthrough of what the app does and why each feature exists.
Plan with friends
The foundation of Trips Together is the shared trip space. Rather than a group chat where everything is mixed together, each trip gets its own dedicated home. All the planning for that trip lives in one place: preferences, votes, itinerary, flight options, activities, and expenses.
This solves the core problem of group chat planning — information scattered across hundreds of messages with no clear way to find decisions that were made three weeks ago. In Trips Together, the plan is always right there, visible to everyone in the group, and always up to date.
Store travel preferences
Before a trip even begins, it helps to know what each person in the group actually wants. Does everyone want a beach holiday, or are some people keener on city breaks? Who has dietary restrictions that will affect restaurant choices? Who is on a tight budget this year?
Trips Together lets each user store their travel preferences — the types of trips they enjoy, destinations they're interested in, and priorities that matter to them. When planning starts, these preferences are visible to the group, so the person coordinating the trip isn't flying blind. Decisions can be made with everyone's context in mind, rather than defaulting to whoever speaks up loudest in the group chat.
Vote for trips
Getting a group to agree on a destination is notoriously difficult. The loudest voice tends to win, even when the quieter members of the group would prefer something different. This leads to trips where some people feel like they never really had a say.
Trips Together's destination voting feature changes the dynamic. The group surfaces destination options and everyone votes on their preferences anonymously and fairly. The results reflect what the group actually wants rather than what was advocated for most persistently. It's a small change in process, but it meaningfully reduces the resentment that can build when decisions feel imposed rather than agreed.
Central itinerary
Once a destination is chosen, the group needs somewhere to build the plan. Trips Together's central itinerary gives everyone a shared, editable view of the trip schedule — day by day, with activities, timings, and notes.
Rather than one person building a plan in a Google Doc that others passively receive, the itinerary in Trips Together is a live shared document. Everyone can see what's planned, what's confirmed, and what's still being worked out. Changes are visible to the whole group immediately. No version confusion and no "I didn't know we were doing that."
Set trip criteria
Every group trip has constraints: how long everyone can get away for, what the maximum budget is per person, what time of year works for everyone's calendars. These constraints usually live in someone's head, or get partially established in an early WhatsApp conversation and then never properly recorded.
Trips Together lets the group set trip criteria clearly — duration, dates, budget range, trip type — so that when options are being evaluated, there's a shared reference point. This prevents the frustrating situation where someone proposes an option that doesn't work for half the group because the basic parameters were never pinned down.
Find flights
Coordinating flight searches across a group is genuinely painful. One person does the research and shares links; by the time others look, the prices have changed. People end up on different flights or paying different fares.
Trips Together's flight-finding feature brings the search into the trip planning space. The group can browse flight options together, see prices in context, and coordinate the booking decision without it spilling across separate conversations. It keeps the flight decision alongside everything else — the dates, the budget, the destination — rather than siloed in someone's browser tabs.
Find activities
Deciding what to do at the destination is one of the most contentious parts of group trip planning. The museum vs. the beach argument. The person who wants the Michelin-starred restaurant vs. the person watching their spending.
Trips Together's activity-finding feature lets the group browse things to do at the destination and vote on what appeals to them. Rather than one person's wishlist becoming the default itinerary, activity selection is a collective decision. The things that genuinely excite the most people get prioritised, and everyone has a voice.
Split expenses
Money is the most common source of tension on group trips. Who paid for the shared taxi? Did the person who organised the dinner get reimbursed? How do you settle up at the end without anyone feeling like they overpaid?
Trips Together's expense splitting feature lets the group log costs as they happen, assign who paid and who owes what, and track the running balance throughout the trip. At the end, the app calculates the cleanest settlement — who owes who what — so the final reconciliation takes minutes rather than an awkward evening of back-and-forth.
This is particularly useful for groups where spending naturally varies. When costs are tracked in real time and everyone can see the running total, there are no surprises at the end and nobody has to feel awkward about bringing up money.
Try Trips Together
Trips Together is available now on the App Store. If you're planning a group trip — whether it's a weekend city break with friends or a two-week holiday with family — it's worth starting your planning there rather than in a group chat.