Getting started

1

Get your space link

Every trip lives inside a space — your own corner of the site, at a link like chriswatson.page/trips/mylink/. Ask Chris for yours; there is no sign-up form and no password.

Treat that link like a key. Anyone who has it can view and edit every trip in your space, including deleting things. It is fine to share with the people you are travelling with — just do not post it anywhere public. Marking a trip "Private" only hides it from the site's public index; it does not lock the link.

Bookmark it. That link is how you get back to your trips.

2

Create a trip

Open your space link and fill in the short form at the top: a name, a destination, and (optionally) start and end dates.

The destination field matters more than it looks. When the app looks up your place names on the map, it biases the search toward that destination — so with Iceland filled in, "Diamond Beach" finds the Icelandic one rather than the Florida one. Set it to the country or region, not the exact town.

Your new trip starts with one itinerary called Main Plan. You can add more later — a second and third itinerary let you compare genuinely different routes on the same map, each in its own colour.

3

Convert the spreadsheet you already have

Most trips start life in a personal Excel file — a row per day, notes in whatever columns made sense at the time. You do not need to retype any of it. Get an AI chat to convert your sheet into the format the app imports.

Download the format file. It is a short Markdown document describing every column the importer understands.
⬇ Download import_instructions.md
Open an AI chat that takes file attachments — Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini all do — and attach both files: the import_instructions.md you just downloaded, and your own .xlsx or .csv.

Paste this message:

Attached are two files: import_instructions.md, which describes the import format for a trip planning app, and my own trip spreadsheet.

Follow the "Converting a spreadsheet you already have" section of import_instructions.md and convert my spreadsheet into a CSV in that format. Apply its rules exactly — including how to work out the Day numbers, when to split one of my rows into several, and which of my columns map onto which of its columns.

Give me the CSV in one code block, then list anything you dropped or had to guess at.

This deliberately points the AI at the downloaded file rather than repeating its rules here, so there is only ever one copy of them to keep up to date. If you would rather paste the full instructions yourself, they are in that same section of the file.

Save the result as a .csv and read it over before importing — the file's "Check the output before importing" checklist is four quick questions. If the chat cannot hand you a file to download, paste the CSV text into a blank spreadsheet and save it as CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited).

No spreadsheet to convert? The same file has a "Building a file from scratch with an AI" section — a prompt that turns loose planning notes into the same CSV. Or skip files entirely and add places one at a time in the app; the importer is a shortcut, not a requirement.

4

Import it

Open your trip and click the itinerary tab you want to import into. This matters: stops and hotel nights attach to the itinerary that is selected, while day visits are shared across the whole trip.
Click Choose file in the import bar and pick your CSV.
Wait for the place lookups. Every place name without coordinates is looked up one at a time against OpenStreetMap, which limits callers to about one lookup per second — so budget roughly a second per row, and a 40-row file takes about a minute. Rows that already carry Lat/Lng are instant.

Importing adds to the itinerary rather than replacing it, and importing the same place twice will not duplicate it. So a second pass to fix a few rows is safe.

5

Clean up what did not land

Place-name lookup is good, not perfect — hotels are the usual culprits, since they are often not in OpenStreetMap under their marketing name.

Anything that could not be found appears in the ⚠ Unresolved imports strip above the map. It stays there until you deal with it, so nothing is quietly lost. Hit Locate to place it by searching or by pasting coordinates.
Anything found in the wrong country is flagged in the import summary with the distance ("5,800 km from Iceland"). Fix those with the map's Fix location button.
Tip for next time: if you have coordinates from Google Maps or a booking confirmation, put them in the Lat/Lng columns. Those rows skip the lookup entirely and are always exact.

6

Now plan

With the trip on the map, the rest of the app is worth knowing about:

The route follows your day visits. Once a day has visits on it, the driving route runs hotel → visits (in the order listed) → hotel, and drive times are calculated on real roads. Reorder them by dragging in the Days panel.
Hotel candidates. Add several options for the same night, compare their notes and prices on the map, and star one as the pick when you decide. Only the starred one shapes the route.
Multiple itineraries. Duplicate the plan, change the route, and flip between them on the same map to see which drives better.
Playback. Press play to watch the trip animate day by day — the fastest way to spot a day with four hours of driving in it.
Sense check. Runs some quick checks over the plan and asks an AI for a second opinion on whether the days are realistic.
Export. Excel or CSV, coordinates included — so an export re-imports instantly, with no lookups. Handy as a backup before a big change.

To show someone the plan without giving them edit access, use the Share link: it opens a read-only version of the map on a long random URL, safe to send to anyone.