Given we call ourselves a decision-making product, we decided a while ago that we need to get these features spot-on before anything else matters, so hopefully you’ll see we’ve put a lot of effort into this.

Brainstorming has been great up until now for getting ideas on the table, but actually getting full contribution for a final decision has been the missing element. Occasional staggered voting from trip members isn’t enough, we need to present a list of options and say “Pick One, Now!”

The Three Stages of Decision-making

Firstly “Brainstorms” have now been renamed to “Decisions”, and are now split into three different steps (Brainstorming happens within a Decision now).

Brainstorm Ideas
This is now a period of time with an expiry where ideas, links and images are added by the group as research. The owner of the decision controls how long this goes for.

“Make Your Pick”
Once the brainstorming time period ends, the group is asked to select their favourite option, or “make a pick”. This is done with a single click from an email, with no need to login, so it’s super easy to get your group to do it.

Owner Finalises
The group is given a couple of days after brainstorming has finished to make their picks. After this time, the owner of the decision can easily finalise the decision in the knowledge that everyone’s had a chance to be heard.

We’ve also built in a way to skip the brainstorming step, so as the creator you add all of the ideas yourself, and the Decision goes straight into the picking stage. (This is basically a Poll as it’s known in the wild!)

Other Features

• Mobile Friendly - We’ve put a lot of work into making Travelstormer display nicely on your mobile devices, this is in beta but we’re excited to get it in front of you.
• Personalise your Trip Background - Customise your trip with a full browser background trip image.
• One-click Login from emails - We’re in constant pursuit to make it easier to get contribution from the ‘lazier’ trip members, we think instant login links are the way forward.
• Print or Download your Itinerary as a PDF - We admit this one’s a little overdue. We hope you’ll find it helpful to check in on when you’re on your trip.

Some might call it ‘constructive feedback’ but that would be BS. What we’re really after is brutal, zero sugar criticism on areas where we suck and the reality is that without it, you don’t stand a chance of survival.

This is what makes being involved in a start up so unique – there is no other experience in life where you are so happy to be told what you’re doing wrong.

Feedback has been the key to Travelstormer’s evolution of the last 12 months. Our vision of simplifying and streamlining the group travel planning process has remained unchanged since day 1 as the need we are aiming to fill is still at the centre of everything we do. What has changed is the way in which we are now attempting to achieve this vision. We have been through much iteration over the last 12 months; all based on what we’ve been told, and more importantly, what we’ve learnt along the way.

Our next round of soon to be live refinement is solely focused on further improving Travelstormer’s nucleus – the decision making process. The journey from idea to itinerary will become a truly seamless experience for all trip members, regardless of whether you are driving the agenda or, just along for the ride.

As we seek funding to take Travelstormer to the next level, we are confident that our willingness to take a beating, combined with our focus on converting this ‘feedback’ into a better user experience, will keep us on track to achieve our vision.

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.

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!

London Bus Tour from moritz oberholzer on Vimeo.

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.

Here’s a brief rundown of what went down;

9:00-11.40am:
Watch the other teams deliver awesome 5 minute pitches to a packed house of fellow seedcampers and an impressive selection of 90 mentors (investors, entrepenuers, creatives, product dev, business dev, tech experts).

11.40-11.45am:
Travelstormer’s turn to take the stage. Presentation 19 out of 20 which we like to think was a case of saving the best until last, alphabetical order was pure coincidence.

12.00 – 12.45pm:
Highly informative M&A and Business Development panel with some great mentors.

12.45 – 1.30pm:
Network, network , network…o yeah, and more networking. (A.K.A – Lunch)

1.30-5.30pm:
Mentoring on steroids! 5 sessions of 45 minutes with 5 mentors in each. Questions followed by answers, answers followed by questions, questions followed by questions. Full volume discussion with barely a second to catch our breath in between. There were moments when it felt like our heads might explode. We received awesome insights and feedback from all the mentor sessions– some supportive, some positive, some not so positive…but all extremely constructive.

We’d like to send a big THANKYOU to all the mentors who showed a real interest in helping us make Travelstormer a success. We now need to take your feedback, overlay it onto our vision for Travelstormer and move forward with confidence.

Congratulations and best of luck to the other teams that attended. Great people with great ideas and we hope to cross paths again one day.

Finally, to the seedcamp team of Carlos, Reshma, Phillip and Kirsten – we loved meeting you guys and thanks for a truly inspirational day.

Well worth the trouble of sending a few students and some cameras around the world. Great execution.

Colin and I are excited to report that we have been accepted into the Mini-Seedcamp London programme taking place next thursday.
It’s a great opportunity for us to meet other entrepreneurs from around Europe along with chatting to some great mentors.

We’re going in with an open mind as I’m sure we will hear new ideas and thoughts coming from all angles.
In other news we’re hoping to go live with a tonne of updates to Travelstormer around the same time, so look out!

Read more over at Seedcamp