Trip planning tools...WHERE ARE THEY?!?!

[Grff]

So I'm relatively new to this forum, but I've been scouring them trying to find tools for planning a trip. Being constantly immersed in data, technology, and software all day in my job, I can't help but think that the tools we have available for planning a Disney vacation from top to bottom are...lacking...A LOT. I don't particularly care about news, content, reviews, crowd levels, wait times, etc as the main feature, since there are plenty of resources for that. I'm talking about well-designed and well-written software specific to planning a Disney trip (or possibly for other Orlando parks).

Here are some tools I'm NOT talking about:

• Disney's own first-party software such as the MDE sites and apps which are clunky and slow. No data-entry but also mostly an "after you've decided to go, and set a budget" tool.
• TouringPlans which is decent but also slow, and not well organized IMHO. Although this software is mostly focused on planning the trip, it's more about planning ride times and planning around crowded days of the week/month/year and less about budgeting or overall planning of the entire trip. No what if scenarios with comparisons without LOTS of manual data-entry.
• My Disney Visit which is very new and lacking in functionality but seems to have good potential the way it is being built. It's also focused on when you're there in the parks. Also lots of manual data-entry.
• Spreadsheet Templates for Excel or Google Drive. I already have a spreadsheet template I created that has over 80 columns, hundreds of formulas, and a bunch of scripts. This doesn't lend itself to good information/data management for more than one person in my opinion. Once again, data-entry, data-entry, data-entry and writing formulas, high-learning curve for most people, can be intimidating to non-stats/math folks, just generally NOT the best solution although data portability can be excellent.

Here are some things I am looking for, or rather "features" I'm thinking of that represent part of my ideal solution:

• Software that has been written specifically from the point of view of planning a trip down to the dime, before ever putting in a CC # to make a reservation (hotel, ADR, others), purchase tickets, pay for flights, etc. Basically, to see a full overview of the budget with details and do what-if scenarios similar to TouringPlans own "Optimize" button.
• Data portability (including exportability) possibly even running and storing data client-side (on the device) but also has the ability to sync back to services such as Google Drive (which I believe has a decent API, never developed with it though) while maintaining decent data security. I don't think this tool would store much beyond basic PII, but certainly not things like SSN, CC#, banking info, etc. Mostly just names, DoB, reservation numbers, flight info, etc.
• Roles and Groups. Think "master trip planner" and subordinate role classes with granular permission sets (or even custom groups with custom permissions). This might be used to gather feedback from family members on activities they must do, want to do, wouldn't mind skipping, where they want to eat, etc. Could also be used to enable "democratic" features like voting for rides, restaurants, activities, etc.
• Some level of integration to other services that leverage existing data. I know this is vague but my best example would be a web-scraping service/browser extension that scrapes data from MDE and populates your "trip plan". It could also mean an API to offer and receive data from other services such as ride names, wait times, addresses, reviews, menus, etc, etc.
• An easy way to define your budget, plan against the Dining Plan promotions (again, compare and see what-if scenarios), plan against Disney's own master-calendar for accomodation-based promotions other than the "free" Dining plan, and an overall budget view.
• Native iOS/Android apps would be a must as planning the entire trip from a well-designed tablet UI/UX is paramount, with additional features available in a desktop web-browser for power-users.
• Generating a PDF "binder-set" and/or business-card-size summaries of each day's events. I see a lot of people doing the binders. Not sure about the business-card summaries though. Might be a good feature?
• Google/Apple Calendar Syncing and export to "click-and-populate" an entire calendar of events you just planned out using the app.
• My head is so full of other ideas this is probably getting too long already.

Anyways, I've become a bit obsessed with either finding this solution or if I can't find it just building it myself. I keep asking myself, would people use this sort of solution? If so, how much would they pay for it? TouringPlans isn't free, so I don't expect my solution would be if I were to put a lot of time/effort into this, but might be something that starts out that way before moving to a subscription/freemium model.

I'd love to hear thoughts from this community if I'm just insanely obsessed for pondering all of this or if some think I'm on to something that the community would find useful. Really, I'm mostly looking for some sign that this would be a valuable tool and not just an effort in personal satisfaction for my own trip-planning usage.

 

[Disnsyncey]

Wow that made my head hurt....I'm glad I don't need this to plan my trips.....and I'm a planner!

Good luck in finding/making that to make your perfect trip!

 

[Grff]

LOL! Well for me this is part of the fun. You're right, it's probably totally unnecessary but I'm stuck on the idea and need some help making up my mind.

 

[FCDub]

Sounds like you're after something that doesn't exist.

 

[Lesley Wake]

Yeah, if you really want something to plan a trip for you, you can probably hire someone! Besides that, you'll have to make do with the various tools and research!

 

[sharonabe]

Software that has been written specifically from the point of view of planning a trip down to the dime, before ever putting in a CC # to make a reservation (hotel, ADR, others), purchase tickets, pay for flights, etc. Basically, to see a full overview of the budget with details and do what-if scenarios similar to TouringPlans own "Optimize" button.

If there's a way to do it, I'd start here and somehow include the comparison to the different "discount" promotions. Problem is, there are so many variables in each possibility, I don't see how you could do "down to the dime."

 

[Grff]

Yeah, if you really want something to plan a trip for you, you can probably hire someone! Besides that, you'll have to make do with the various tools and research!

Well, the idea behind the app was putting the planning power back into the hands of the person/people going and not leaving things up to a travel agent. I have no problem with travel agents and know many people prefer to go through someone who can do much of the heavy lifting and who love the personalized service. I know it's free to the consumer, but personally, I'm not one of those people (yes, I place very little trust in most other people most of the time). I would simply not be satisfied with my trip unless I planned it myself. The lack of current tools just surprises me more than anything else. I find that there are plenty of financial planning tools out there for everything except something like a theme-park destination like WDW. I really don't think planning a trip to WDW/WDL (or perhaps Universal...maybe) is quite like planning any other vacation. It's far more complex and has become a lot more tedious, typically far more expensive, and possibly even riskier when you consider all of the interpolated activities of a WDW trip itinerary. Maybe I'm just over-thinking this way too much.

If there's a way to do it, I'd start here and somehow include the comparison to the different "discount" promotions. Problem is, there are so many variables in each possibility, I don't see how you could do "down to the dime."

I think that would be the easy part! The biggest obstacle I think is just data-entry. It can be SOOO tedious. Running scenarios would probably be quite easy. It may take some tweaking from time to time to adjust the formulas and algorithms running behind the scenes, but from what I've seen, IMHO the dining and discount promotions tend to be largely static with a few minor changes here and there. They even usually run during similar time-periods each year.

Maybe down to the time is a bit fastidious? Perhaps a better option would be to scale a "trip plan" against a proposed budget range (ex. $1000 to $3000 for 6 nights, 7 days). From a user story POV you give the tool your budget and your time frame and maybe check a few "must-do" rides, restaurants, activities then run an "optimization" to output different scenarios comparing hotels, flights, etc. From there you could customize and filter to your heart's content picking out specific rides, restaurants, etc. The end goal is to find a "trip plan" that fits your budget with relative ease giving you complete control from start to finish and integrating with the first-party tools Disney already has. Again, maybe I'm just totally overthinking this. lol

 

[sharonabe]

Maybe down to the time is a bit fastidious? Perhaps a better option would be to scale a "trip plan" against a proposed budget range (ex. $1000 to $3000 for 6 nights, 7 days). From a user story POV you give the tool your budget and your time frame and maybe check a few "must-do" rides, restaurants, activities then run an "optimization" to output different scenarios comparing hotels, flights, etc. From there you could customize and filter to your heart's content picking out specific rides, restaurants, etc. The end goal is to find a "trip plan" that fits your budget with relative ease giving you complete control from start to finish and integrating with the first-party tools Disney already has. Again, maybe I'm just totally overthinking this. lol

A proposed budget range would be easier and it would give people a better idea of what they can get for their money. I just think the data entry for creating it is overwhelming, and then as Disney changes prices of resorts, FOOD, etc, the maintenance could get tedious as well.

I do think people would pay for something like this if it was a nominal fee like TP. If you ever get serious about it, you might want to reach out to the distripplanner people. They've done some of the work, trying to compare paying OOP or using dining plans. Personally, I don't think they have their math quite right, but even that might be helpful in trying to perfect such a system.

 

[Grff]

A proposed budget range would be easier and it would give people a better idea of what they can get for their money. I just think the data entry for creating it is overwhelming, and then as Disney changes prices of resorts, FOOD, etc, the maintenance could get tedious as well.

I do think people would pay for something like this if it was a nominal fee like TP. If you ever get serious about it, you might want to reach out to the distripplanner people. They've done some of the work, trying to compare paying OOP or using dining plans. Personally, I don't think they have their math quite right, but even that might be helpful in trying to perfect such a system.

Totally agree with you that the data-entry is tedious, but it may not be necessary to get started. I'm thinking a better option to enable the best user experience is to offer a totally custom option for power users, but by default offer "popular trip plans" generated both by veterans (think "featured plans" by well-known trip planners) and from heuristic analysis of the trips people have created in the past basing the most popular rides, restaurants, and activities; basically working off of data-driven trends. This would drastically cut down the amount of manual data-entry to only a handful of fields needed while also affording complete customizability. Essentially, start by choosing from a variety of templates and customize to your liking instead of having to start from scratch. Put another way, start with a completed plan, and work backwards changing things to fit a budget and/or list of must-do activities. This isn't so different from TouringPlan's own templates. But again, the overall goal of this tool is not to predict crowd levels or optimize walking/waiting times. It is to optimize for a budget, both in time and dollars.

I've actually used the DisTripPlanner site before, and find it incredibly useful but also terribly vague. To get a true comparison I had to build my ideal trip in a spreadsheet and then compare the totals I came up with (choosing actual menu items), and contrasting that to their analysis from the same restaurants using both the a la carte pricing and DDP pricing. Anyways, you're right about it being a good starting point and it is definitely an inspiration. Unfortunately, it sort of forces you to plan your trip around food, which I think may take some of the fun and "magic" out of the whole experience. I would love to see if they have an API I can use. I know TouringPlans has one, but I'm not opposed to just building a web-scraper to get the info I need directly from Disney's own website. It wouldn't actually be all *that* difficult but would require some significant development time and increases the ambition of this project quite a bit. Aside from that, the biggest problem is getting accurate room availability and pricing data. Disney's website has no API, but the data it exposes is relatively clean and can be parsed with a bit of work. I would essentially have to build another web-scraping tool (probably a browser extension for Chrome or Firefox) that leverages a user's own MDE account. In other words, one would first need to login to MDE, THEN run my tool against a range of selected resorts and time-frames to get the data they are looking for.

The idea of a web-scraper would cut down on maintenance in the long-term and automate the biggest part of keeping the tool up to date, however, Disney's web folks hate them for good reason. Remember the ADR bots and their associated scalping services where you could "buy" ADRs? The automated ones were probably built using similar technology that would literally hammer Disney's web infrastructure hundreds of thousands of times a day searching constantly for ADRs dumping the results to a database then selling that info to people for a fee. The primary difference between that sort of tool and my tool would be that mine is not selling actual reservations, but rather providing a complex budget forecast of what the vacation (and components) "could" cost with a very high degree of accuracy. It's an analysis tool, not a reservation scalping system. EDIT: Also mine would be user-initiated and run client-side, not run on a schedule from a web server all-day-long. That's a key difference and is much kinder to Disney's website(s).

I think you're idea about the tediousness of both data-entry and data-gathering has given me an alternate path here and helped me think through some of the necessary components to make this sort of app a possibility. Back to the drawing board I go. Thanks for your feedback! It's exactly what I was looking for.

 

[Aflyingbuttress]

This all just seems super complicated, and unnecessarily so. This kind of sounds to me like you have an excel spreadsheet that you put all your information in to plan your trips and what you want is for that to actually be an app that populates itself.

Doesn't the Disney site already do most of this? You can compare different vacation packages and also answer a bunch of questions for it to make some recommendations to you. You can reconfigure and save them to compare. You can see all the restaurant menus with price estimates, plus search for reservations and addd them to your itinerary. You can find all the rides and attractions and add them to your itinerary too. It also lists events and shows, shopping, etc. all of which can be added to your itinerary. You can also add family members, link to them and friends or people you're traveling with and choose to manage their plans yourself or let them manage it. You can manage fast passes and dining reservations, store payment and shipping information, and add note and wish list items.

I guess the only thing it doesn't have is a way to see a cost total of all the restaurants you want to eat at added up, but then there is the distripplaner. I guess I'm just confused. I feel like there are a ton of tools out there.

 

[achang2001]

WHOA! I thought I was an obsessive planner! Being a DVC owner has made my life easier as there's always a place to stay and a 60 day FP window available. The information you wanted to incorporate made my head spin but that's how apps get started and become a success! With all the people that visit Disney every year, you could be onto something. Add Disneyland and Universal Orlando to the mix, and you'll have thousands of users!

 

[Grff]

This all just seems super complicated, and unnecessarily so. This kind of sounds to me like you have an excel spreadsheet that you put all your information in to plan your trips and what you want is for that to actually be an app that populates itself.

Doesn't the Disney site already do most of this? You can compare different vacation packages and also answer a bunch of questions for it to make some recommendations to you. You can reconfigure and save them to compare. You can see all the restaurant menus with price estimates, plus search for reservations and addd them to your itinerary. You can find all the rides and attractions and add them to your itinerary too. It also lists events and shows, shopping, etc. all of which can be added to your itinerary. You can also add family members, link to them and friends or people you're traveling with and choose to manage their plans yourself or let them manage it. You can manage fast passes and dining reservations, store payment and shipping information, and add note and wish list items.

I guess the only thing it doesn't have is a way to see a cost total of all the restaurants you want to eat at added up, but then there is the distripplaner. I guess I'm just confused. I feel like there are a ton of tools out there.

HAHAHA!!! YES, that's exactly what I want! But I don't expect it to populate everything itself. That would be magical.

To be perfectly honest, I'm not quite sure I want to continue building spreadsheets when I could focus the effort into something others might also want to use. That was my original question. Would people use this or not? It sounds like for you and probably many others, that's not the case and you'd rather use the Disney website. I'm just not a huge fan of their site. In my opinion, it's slow, clunky, and almost for every option requires a painfully slow page reload. The UI/UX isn't all bad, but what planning tools they do have are disjointed and lacking in functionality and not seriously integrated enough to give you a full overview of your total cost. At least not until after you get home and start adding up receipts. lol

I think I probably just haven't defined the vision/mission of this proposed app well enough; in the data/tech world it's what we call a "single pane of glass", or more simply a "dashboard". The goal is to visualize the total cost of an entire trip based on a pre-defined budget parameters giving you an overview of detailed properties of each component for the ENTIRE trip down to what resort you want to stay at (or maybe choose to stay off-site, no need to be partial to only WDW or DL), rides you plan to ride at what time (like a touring plan) and when to book your FP+, to what restaurants you eat at what time and how much they cost (like distripplanner's tool but more detailed if you want it to be) and when to make ADRs, as well as all of the transportation options (like is it cheaper to use an Uber or a Minnie Van?) available to you and how different options affect your time. Of course, the estimate would also need to include tax, tips, incidentals, fees, etc, etc. I think another important piece of functionality would be to integrate with the existing Disney site and offer a way to "automagically" book your ADRs, FP+, and other activities through the app. I think that would be really cool!

The closest thing we have to this right now is TouringPlans, but that is not a cost budgeting tool, but rather meant to help you budget your time. So at least it solves one part of the equation! Honestly though, thank you for your point of view! This is the sort of feedback I'm looking for.

WHOA! I thought I was an obsessive planner! Being a DVC owner has made my life easier as there's always a place to stay and a 60 day FP window available. The information you wanted to incorporate made my head spin but that's how apps get started and become a success! With all the people that visit Disney every year, you could be onto something. Add Disneyland and Universal Orlando to the mix, and you'll have thousands of users!

LOL! Yeah, I think I went too over the top at first! I should have narrowed this down a bit before posting. Anyways, I didn't even think about the DVC point of view. That's a good thing to add to my list. Maybe DVC point rental is cheaper than some of the regular on-property resort options? Anyways, I do think I would build this tool to be generic enough to accommodate other parks and not just WDW/DL. I'm just not sure people who visit Univeral and other non-Disney parks are near as obsessed with planning for those parks.

 

[Aflyingbuttress]

Yeah, I agree with you that the site is slow and clunky. I wish it was better. But that is on large part the nature of software that is pulling a ton of data and then sending it across the internet. I suppose if there was something better I'd be happy about it though.

 

[wonderstruck88]

I'm a bit confused about what it is you're after since you say you don't care about crowd levels, reviews, wait times, news, etc. Those are super essential pieces and any trip planning tool that gave me none of that information would get zero interest for my family's trip planning process. It seems that your main two concerns are financing and collaborating with various family members. I've really never had a problem doing either of those. It's quite easy for me to price everything out on Disney's website, look at the menus of restaurants I'm interested in to see what price I'm looking at for meals, look at the history to see what kind of deals might roll out, etc. And I don't see why special software is needed to collaborate when you can just have everyone talk about it so the main planner can get everyone on the same page. If talking in person isn't possible, there's group text, google docs, etc. I just find out what everyone wants to do and then use TouringPlans to optimize it all. But you said none of those tools are what you're looking for so...I guess I don't get it. It sounds like you have a very specific and unique idea of what aspects of vacation planning are most important to you. I think just pulling up the info you're looking for and plugging it into excel sounds the most simple for the financial options - no need for fancy software there, in my opinion.

 

[patty57]

I must have attention span issues. I couldn't get through your first post.

 

[Aflyingbuttress]

I'm curious what you do for work. I work in operations for a software a software company and some of the things you're talking about are so complex that we don't even do them in our internal systems. It's not as simple as it seems to pull all that data from multiple platforms into just one. Without integrating systems you'd really have to input the data yourself and I don't know how you would do that without an insane amount of upkeep.

 

[marcyleecorgan]

I don't think Disney is just going to be comfortable handing the information necessary for your app idea over to random third-parties. There is a reason why they have Disney-affiliated travel agents.

I imagine the underpinnings of data like resort room inventory, guest capacity, etc. is either going to fall under "industry secrets" or "the guests' personal information".

And good grief Disney is working with legacy systems from the late 1990's!!!! They certainly are NOT going to choose to invest the IT overhaul that this project would require!

 

[Grff]

I'm a bit confused about what it is you're after since you say you don't care about crowd levels, reviews, wait times, news, etc. Those are super essential pieces and any trip planning tool that gave me none of that information would get zero interest for my family's trip planning process. It seems that your main two concerns are financing and collaborating with various family members. I've really never had a problem doing either of those. It's quite easy for me to price everything out on Disney's website, look at the menus of restaurants I'm interested in to see what price I'm looking at for meals, look at the history to see what kind of deals might roll out, etc. And I don't see why special software is needed to collaborate when you can just have everyone talk about it so the main planner can get everyone on the same page. If talking in person isn't possible, there's group text, google docs, etc. I just find out what everyone wants to do and then use TouringPlans to optimize it all. But you said none of those tools are what you're looking for so...I guess I don't get it. It sounds like you have a very specific and unique idea of what aspects of vacation planning are most important to you. I think just pulling up the info you're looking for and plugging it into excel sounds the most simple for the financial options - no need for fancy software there, in my opinion.

I do care about them! Just not with regard to a budget planning tool. I totally agree with you they are a necessary and useful tool, but have no part in this tool (at least not from what I envision) as they are mostly irrelevant until you've actually booked a room somewhere, right? I mean it's great info to have, and of course, I rely on many of these tools for my trips. But they aren't really necessary until you've actually decided to book a room and move forward with your plan to go on a vacation. I get what you're saying, but using Disney's website can be incredibly tedious. I'm started to think people just aren't able to see the vision for the app. My primary goal for such the app is to take away most of that tediousness and present a total cost with as few clicks as possible. That's what is most important to me when considering how much to budget for my next trip, the total cost.

I think you're right about the discussion piece though. Of course, it's always easier to talk in person and make notes, but that still wouldn't necessarily give me the information I was looking for. Knowing which activities my family wants to do matters quite a bit. I'm kind of torn though, because I think that the collaboration functionality would be really cool for larger families/groups to decide and make a master itinerary in a hierarchy of who is doing what, when, and where. To me that sort of information matters A LOT when trying to plan a trip for my extended family and ensure everyone can both agree on activities, restaurants, but also be able to afford their own portion. I'm certainly not in a position financially where I want to just bankroll the whole trip for my extended family (and I doubt most people are), although I'm sure they would love that. lol

 

[Grff]

I'm curious what you do for work. I work in operations for a software a software company and some of the things you're talking about are so complex that we don't even do them in our internal systems. It's not as simple as it seems to pull all that data from multiple platforms into just one. Without integrating systems you'd really have to input the data yourself and I don't know how you would do that without an insane amount of upkeep.

I work in IT engineering/operations for a research university. My background is primarily in web development/engineering, but I also deal with data and some software development (mostly smaller, in-house web tools built in Javascript). I mostly manage other engineers/technicians at the moment, but I still like to roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty on a regular basis. I think you're spot-on that data integration isn't always easy, but it's also not always difficult. Also, I like puzzles and that's what would make this a fun project for me! It would be a bit of a challenge but we're talking about data that is made available to the public in HTML format. Scraping Disney's site using client-side scripts is NOT difficult. There are plenty of open-source software tools available that do just that; gather data from sites that do not have publicly-accessible (or any) APIs with which to query data. That is the beauty of the open web. If it's available to the public, it can be consumed by a variety of browsing tools, including those with no GUI (i.e. a scraper). Using this model there is mainly only upkeep of the tool itself to ensure it's looking in the right places for the data it needs, not maintaining the data itself.

 

[mamamelody2]

I must have attention span issues. I couldn't get through your first post.

Ha, me neither! I'm not technological enough to understand half of it, and my eyes started to cross.