Most "AI trip planners" hand you a wall of text and call it a plan. Wanderply is built the opposite way: it asks the handful of questions that actually change an itinerary, then builds you a structured, day-by-day plan you can edit, share, and take on the road offline.
Here's the whole flow, start to finish.
Step 1 — Where, when, and who
You give Wanderply a destination, optionally an origin (if you're driving), your dates, and how many people are coming. That's the skeleton. If you're arriving from a quiz or a road-trip guide, the destination is often already filled in for you.
Step 2 — The levers that actually matter
This is where Wanderply is different. Instead of a blank prompt box, you set the four things that genuinely reshape a trip:
- Pace — relaxed, balanced, or packed. This decides how many stops land in a day.
- Budget — shoestring to luxury. This changes the kind of places we suggest, not just the price tags.
- Preferences — free-form: dietary needs, accessibility, must-dos, hard avoids. Type it like you'd tell a friend.
- Transport — your own car, a rental, flying, or a mix. If you're driving with an origin, Wanderply plans famous stops along the route as timed activities, not just the endpoints.
Must-includes: your non-negotiables
The single most-requested feature. Add anchors like "Disneyland — 2 days" or "Hoover Dam" and Wanderply schedules every one of them, honoring the durations you stated. As you type, a live summary on the right updates so you can see the trip taking shape.
Step 3 — Highlights, pre-matched
Before the plan is built, Wanderply researches the destination's highlights and shows them as cards. If one of your must-includes fuzzy-matches a highlight — you typed "Disney," we found "Disneyland Park" — it's pre-selected and badged so you're not picking the same thing twice. Anything of yours we couldn't match to a card is listed in an "Already in your plan" strip so nothing gets lost.
Step 4 — The build
Hit build and Wanderply assembles a full itinerary: real days, real activities, verified coordinates (we geocode every stop, because language models hallucinate map pins), a packing checklist, and a clean markdown plan you can read like a guidebook. The plan is viewable in under a minute; the spoken narration for each stop fills in shortly after, off to the side, so you're never staring at a spinner.
After the build: it's yours to shape
A plan is a starting point, not a verdict.
- The concierge lets you ask for changes in plain language — "make day two more relaxed," "swap the museum for something outdoors" — and it proposes edits you approve with one tap before anything changes. The AI never silently rewrites your trip.
- Share it by email. Everyone who's coming sees the same live plan, and each person can rename the trip just for themselves without touching what anyone else sees.
- Link your trails. Drop in an AllTrails URL and Wanderply pulls the trailhead's elevation and distance into the plan.
Two other ways to start
Not every trip is a week away.
- Day trips — tell Wanderply your home base and what you're into, and it researches nearby ideas and builds a one-day plan.
- Curated road-trip guides — hand-built routes like San Francisco → Vegas or Denver → Moab, ready to open in the planner with a tap.
The point of all of it is the same: spend your energy on the trip, not on the spreadsheet. Start one for free and see how close the first draft gets.
