Hacker Remix

Show HN: Ambulate – Detailed Trip Planning

74 points by _phnd_ 15 hours ago | 36 comments

Ambulate was created because planning hiking trips using spreadsheets and various map solutions got chaotic. I wanted an app to manage and map multi day trip itineraries in the outdoors/backcountry.

Features - Manage itineraries - Add activities and map markers - Add routes (upload GPX or plot by hand on map) - Desktop and mobile

It is free to try (login using Google or create a user). Alternatively the slides on the home page give an idea of the UI.

I'll appreciate any thoughts and feedback you care to share:)

jll29 7 hours ago

If anyone needs a good (related) startup idea, here's one for free:

Complex trip planning for professionals, but in a different way from Ambulate - not hiking trips, but transactions across Web sites: I really hate the way how today you cannot "properly" book a flight, hotel, train like you would do it in a SQL transaction

  BEGIN TRANSACTION
    book train
    book flight
    book hotel
  COMMIT;

Only if all three are available and execute the reservation without error do I also want to execute the other ones; that's a prime use case for DB-like transactions, but across Websites. Because no point getting only the flight if I have no-where to stay etc.

Karrot_Kream 6 hours ago

It sounds like the difficulty is mostly in the "book train", "book flight", and "book hotel" steps along with the associated rollback actions. Booking.com and Expedia probably have built their moat around aggregating these steps. If anyone works in this industry, I'd love to know if that's not the case.

MarkMarine 2 hours ago

I’ve been thinking of solving (something slightly more complex than) that with simulated annealing. Getting all those variables to line up is hard. NP hard. My use was setting a couple loose params for vacation (beach, flight <8 hours, flexible dates) and having it find me the full package.

Funny thing is this is already a job when I thought about it. Travel agents used to do this, now it feels like going to a “financial advisor” where they are more interested in selling you the package with a kickback

warbaker 1 hour ago

A solution to this is to book your flight first, then the hotel, as all airlines (that I'm aware of) allow for a full refund within 24 hrs.

dvt 7 hours ago

This is what booking.com kind of tries to do, but I think it's actually a pretty hard problem not only because of scheduling quirks, but often times stuff being delayed, bad weather, etc. will totally throw a wrench into plans.

It would be nice to book a trip with planned contingencies. So basically, no matter what happens, you'll have something to do. This seems kind of a luxury product though, so I'm not sure how many people would be interested in paying a premium.

SoftTalker 2 hours ago

I knew a guy who was a public speaker. He would be engaged to do keynotes at conferences, or talks at big offsite corporate retreats, stuff like that. He would always book two, sometimes three flights to events that he absolutely could not miss, so that if one flight was canceled, he would just take a different one without having to hassle with a rebooking under time pressure.

jeffreyrogers 6 hours ago

You can't really do it perfectly unless a single site handles all the booking, otherwise you have race conditions, and obviously there's no incentive for airlines, hotels, etc. to give up booking to a third party since they can upsell you on insurance, upgrades, etc.

madeofpalk 4 hours ago

> and obviously there's no incentive for airlines, hotels, etc. to give up booking to a third party

Airlines, hotels, etc give up booking all the time to third parties. That's what booking.com is.

wildrhythms 6 hours ago

I can't remember if it was booking.com or some other site like travelocity, but I booked a hotel for work in Dublin, I arrived, and they couldn't find my reservation. After about 30 minutes of the desk staff confusingly clicking around on a computer they 'found' it and I was able to check in. This was a modern hotel too. I stopped using those sites and now only book through the hotel's website, even if it costs more.

kunley 6 hours ago

I rather think what booking.com is really trying to do is to get money from car rental and flight ticket companies for embedding links to their sales.

I mean, it's meant to bring benefit to them, not to the user.

n4r9 14 hours ago

I love this idea. It's simple, effective, and the UI is great. The account creation process is such a relief. Editing and saving trips is delightfully fast. A few suggestions:

* When adding an activity (or route), I instinctively look for a button at the buttom that says "Save activity". And possibly one that says "Cancel". Right now it's immediately saved and appears on the itinerary. That might be faster, but it leaves me feeling anxious about state.

* The ability to share a Trip with others and even to allow collaboration would be a game-changer. Might require you to allow people to view/create/edit Trips with a "guest" account.

* It would be amazing if there was a way to automatically generate driving or public transport directions and have the Activity and Route both added into the itinerary.

almog 6 hours ago

I'll start with the least important detail but the first one I noticed: the main page features an example image that shows mountains scenery that could have been the foothill of the divide from the south west (based on the combination of the vegetation and peaks), however, the trip planning details are for somewhere in Norway which was very confusing until I checked and saw it was an AI generated image.

But to the more important stuff: the main tools I've been using for trail/route planning (for over 6K miles) are Gaia and CalTopo. These tools have a lot of route building tools and overlays for both planning and navigation and I guess you don't want to replace these tools and if you acknowledge hikers are using these tools already and see a way to complement them somehow, I think you want to let the user directly reference their tracks/routes from within Ambulate as it's unlikely they'd like to replicate their work in another tool.

manav 5 hours ago

I get that ambulate just means to walk around but it gives the sense to something medical (as an American).

allenu 5 hours ago

That was my reaction as well to seeing the name. It makes me think of both ambulance and amputate, which are not good associations.

aspenmayer 5 hours ago

The usage of the word is reminiscent of ambulatory which has a distinctive medical jargon connotation to my ear.