We’ve recently updated the trip homepage to include a series of the most relevant content from your trip and the tasks related to them. We’ve been testing this behind the scenes for a while and we think it’s a great way to get the right content in front of the group.

These come in the form of decisions you need to contribute to, unread messages and expenses you owe (or are owed). If you have any questions you can always reach us at support.travelstormer.com, we hope you find it useful.

As you may have discovered by now if you use Travelstormer, we’re constantly iterating our design and flow through the website. We believe a website can never truly be “finished” as the needs of its users are constantly evolving and being surfaced, which should in turn be reflected by the website itself.

We’ve been testing a new version of the Travelstormer sidebar where the trip image, and other confirmed trip details sit above your brainstorms, rather than above the activity feed.

This change gives more attention to the activity feed and sits the confirmed details of your trip near the unconfirmed (brainstormed) details. You’ll also find you have the ability to upload a much larger trip image now, so make sure you put something inspirational up for your group planning HQ!

Expenses are an awesome part of Travelstormer, we see groups using a lot so it makes sense that we give you the best experience possible.
We’ve polished the Expenses view to give you a bit better insight into what makes up each purchase, including an expandable panel showing the shares involved in each purchase and how the split breaks down. We hope you find it useful!
PS. Keep an eye out in this months Money Magazine for a feature on Expenses in Travelstormer…

While some of us do it every day, this video from Moritz makes it something a little special.

London Bus Tour from moritz oberholzer on Vimeo.

It’s fair to say we’ve been busy at Travelstormer. For the past 12 months we have been always listening, and sometimes learning how we can make Travelstormer the essential planning tool for travelling with friends.

So here we are with Travelstormer 2.0, our biggest round of improvements since launch and we hope you’re as excited about the new features as we are!

Hotels

• Full search integration with 135,000 hotels globally with Hotels.com and Google Maps integration.
• “Where are we staying?” brainstorms are automatically generated when you create your trip so you can add these hotels directly to be discussed with your group.
• Keep on top of who’s booked by indicating whether you or any others have locked in a Hotel.

Itinerary

• We’ve finally replaced the tired old Calendar with a slick new stacked Itinerary view.
• Watch it fill up “auto-magically” as your group finalises it’s brainstorm decisions.
• Email/Print Itinerary coming very soon….

Invites and Privacy

• You can now invite people without them having to worry about signing up to participate, we send your friends a link that gives them temporary access to the trip, so they can check it out before commiting to anything.
• You can also make a trip public and hand out the single invite link to whoever you like and they get the same immediate access to the trip without signing up.
• You can of course keep things as private as ever if you like .

Brainstorms

• We’ve really tidied up the decision-making flow a lot, giving the creator of the brainstorm responsibility to decide for the group once enough people have voiced their opinion.
• You can finalise multiple responses in a brainstorm, and it will create an event in the itinerary for each one to get you going on building out your specific events for different dates.

Email Notifications

• We’ve had a lot of feedback over these and we’re glad we can finally show you a new version!
• We’ve now moved most of what you see on the Travelstormer website into our emails, so for those who are too busy to log in and use the website it’s ok, you will find you can do a lot from the emails, this is great for keeping your lazy friends updated.
• Email frequency settings coming very soon…

Activity Feed

• We’ve completely overhauled our activity feed, so you can now comment and vote directly on a much nicer looking and relevant set of updates across your trip.

We’d love you to let us know what you think of any of these new additions when you try them out. There are tonnes more smaller issues we’ve fixed, along with a lot of visual updates that we’re sure will improve your experience.