A friend of mine recently told me about Duffel, an online visual trip planner. Since I’ll be going on a 2-month trip soon, I thought I’d try Duffel out during the planning stages.

About Duffel

Duffel allows you to collect and organize information that is relevant to your trip. You can share this information publicly, collaborate with a friend, or keep it private. Even if you’re not necessarily planning a trip, you can still collect information about a place and save it onto Duffel, so that when the time comes that you’re ready to visit, all you have to do is pull up your research and incorporate it into your itinerary.

Right now, Duffel is still in Private Beta mode – meaning it’s fully functional, but there might still be some software bugs present.

What I like about it

The most useful thing about Duffel is that the interface is straightforward and uncluttered. You can just drag and drop items with your mouse. Even if you’re not a computer whiz, it’s fairly easy to learn how to use it. You can categorize your research under several categories, including activity, food and drink, lodging, transportation, and generic notes. You can also add comments on specific items, an important feature if you’re planning a trip with a friend.

Areas that need improvement

Even after testing Duffel and liking it, there are still some features I’d like to see as they develop this tool further. I hope that they’d eventually allow users to have multiple calendar views. More importantly, I hope the tool can automatically compute the cost of the trip based on the data we enter.

This tool may still be in beta mode, but I think I’ll use it again when I’m planning future trips. I haven’t encountered any problems so far, and while there’s still room for improvement, Duffel is off to an impressive start.