for trips too long to fit in a spreadsheet
A planning desk for trips measured in months. Draft the route as scenarios, catch every booking window before it opens, and bring everyone else along with a live map — and none of the receipts.
An example route: London to Tokyo overland — sixteen stops, ninety-one nights. Each poster hangs on the day you check in, so the gap between two of them is how long you stayed.
Why a spreadsheet gives up
Add two nights in Kyoto and every date after it is wrong — check-ins, trains, the flight you already hold. In a spreadsheet that is an afternoon of retyping and one missed cell. Here it is a drag: the boundary moves, the nights redistribute, and the rest of the trip re-dates itself.
Japanese rail opens thirty days out. China’s opens fifteen. Taiwan’s, twenty-eight. Those clocks run on the ticket’s calendar, not yours, and a sold-out shinkansen changes the shape of the route. Long Traveler sorts the whole trip by the day each window opens.
The friends and family following your trip want the map, the photographs and where you ate. They do not want the hotel invoices or the four-currency ledger. One trip, two views — and the money never crosses over.
Scenarios
Most planners hold one itinerary, so arguing about it means destroying it. Long Traveler holds as many complete routes as you want to argue about — each with its own stops, nights, hotels and bookings. Publish one and everyone following sees the change. The others sit there, intact, ready to become the plan.
Tokyo7
Oirase2
Hakodate2
Sapporo2
Kyoto4
Osaka4
Shanghai5
Chengdu3
Chongqing2
Zhangjiajie3
Guilin3
Hong Kong7
Taipei3
Sun Moon Lake3
Tainan3
Keelung2
Ishigaki3
Tokyo4Keep moving. Eighteen check-ins, nothing longer than a week.
Tokyo7Kyoto4Osaka5
Fukuoka5Shanghai9Hong Kong15Taipei10
Okinawa3
Hakone2Tokyo2Unpack ten times instead of eighteen. Two weeks in one harbour.
Same sixty-two nights, same first and last flight. One of these is eighteen hotel check-ins; the other is ten, and two weeks of it is one harbour.
The booking radar
Every reservation carries two dates: when it happens, and the last sensible day to buy it. The second one is the one that bites — presale windows open on their own clocks, months apart from the travel itself. The desk counts down to those.
It knows the channels, too: which ticket is an eki-net job, which needs a passport-verified 12306 account set up weeks earlier, and which is a single alarm at midnight Tokyo time.
The companion app
One app for the waiting and the being-there: a countdown with a poster habit, the whole route with the beds you actually booked, and a photo desk that files every frame by where you stood when you took it. These are real screens from a real trip, thirty-four days before it leaves.
Before you go, the tile walks your route — a different place almost every time you look, with the days left stamped over it and the whole trip drawn underneath. Once you are travelling the number turns around and counts up, the poster settles on where you woke, and a second tile starts showing the day’s own photographs.
There is a glance for the Watch, too: the number, the place, the next deadline.
Counting down, then counting up — and the day’s own photograph, straight from the phone that took it. The last one is an illustration; the trip has not left yet.
Unretouched screenshots, apart from two things blurred out: the travellers’ names, and a booking reference. iPhone and iPad, with widgets and a Watch glance, on the same invitation.
One trip, two views
The desk
for whoever is planning it
Following along
for everyone else
One account does both. Follow a friend’s trip while you plan your own — it is the same sign-in, and each trip decides whether you are at the desk or along for the ride.
Costs are filtered out on the server, not hidden in the interface — a guest session never receives them.
Pricing
The subscription covers the trip you are planning: every version of the route, every booking deadline, the research behind all of it, and 10 GB of photo storage. Everyone you invite to follow along is free, however many you invite.
The traveler
$49/ month
or $399 a year — $189 less than paying monthly
Invitation-only for now — founding travelers are set up by hand. Your first trip is included while Long Traveler is in early access. Billing starts when open sign-ups do — never mid-trip.
Following along
$0forever
If a traveler has invited you, your sign-in is already waiting.
The research is AI-assisted at every step: a full write-up for any place you tap on the map, what to see and eat on each day, transport compared for every leg, a review of the finished route, and plain answers to questions about your own itinerary. Forward a confirmation email and it files itself onto the trip as a booking.
A trip planned in full runs to thousands of these requests. They are part of the subscription — nothing metered, and no credits to buy.
Drawn, not photographed
One house style across all of them, so a route reads as a rack of posters before you have read a single date — on the wall, along the top of the day-by-day, and hanging off the timeline you plan on.
220 destinations drawn so far, and counting.
Long Traveler is invitation-only while it is young. If you have a long trip coming, say where you are going.
