The Challenge

Travel habits have changed. It isn’t enough for travelers to visit a few bucket list destinations. Travelers now have higher expectations and demand a more personalized, discerning experience. With a higher standard, it is even more difficult to plan a good trip. Today, it is a fragmented and frustrating process involving research, organization, and the need to filter through unreliable sponsored content and crowdsourced reviews. 

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The Solution

For the past 2 years, Tiffany Shi and I partnered to create Travel Trove, a travel planning tool for those who love to optimize and maximize their trips. It allows travelers to browse their friends’ and favorite tastemakers’ itineraries (e.g. Anthony Bourdain’s favorite restaurants), plan the most optimized trip using personalized recommendations from Travel Trove, and share their trips with their friends.

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We launched the beta in the fall of 2019, focusing on the planning tool and our core users; avid planners. We got great initial traction, but then Covid happened and the world (and travel) stopped. We took our time, reflected on what we had created and imagined how it could be better.

And in the fall of 2021 we launched the next iteration of our beta, a better planning experience inspired by all the learnings from the initial beta and countless conversations with our users.

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The Impact

The bigger vision for Travel Trove is to become the definite platform for travel. The brand people constantly come back to seek inspiration and fulfill curiosities about places around the world, organize and plan travel, collaborate with friends, book trips, and share experiences to inspire others. We are on a mission of not only helping people see the world, but helping them experience each trip to the fullest. That’s why we’ve created Travel Trove.