TravelMuse: plan group trips with ease

The web is a hotbed of travel resources, in fact, sometimes it seems like the web is pretty much just travel sites and porn. In my day job at Wired.com I get marketing promos for some new travel website at least once a week.

Most aren’t worth mentioning, but occasionally something useful pops up, like TravelMuse, which launched earlier this summer. The site isn’t wholly original, but it has enough unique features to distinguish it from the crowd of competitors.

TravelMuse is primary intended as a trip planner — create an account, add a trip and use the host of features to plan your trip.

Two things distinguish it from the myriad of other sites offering similar features. First off, it has a very nice interface with drag-and-drop tools that allow you to reorder itineraries as you need, automatically updating your trip as you go. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a travel site that looks as slick and is as easy to use as TravelMuse.

The other great feature is the ability to plan trips with friends. While group travel isn’t for everyone, one way to ease some of the potential pain is to make sure everyone has a say in where you’re going. TravelMuse makes that easy by allowing you to invite friends and add them to a trip. Once they’ve signed up your friends can reorder, change and add to your itinerary.

The group planning features would be especially handy if you’re on a long trip and planning to meet up with people along the way — just add your side trip to the site, invite your friends and then collaborate on your shared time so everybody stays happy.

The other standout feature — one that more sites should offer — is the ability to bookmark any other webpage in TravelMuse.

Say you’re planning a trip to Bangkok, but TravelMuse’s Bangkok city guide isn’t as nice as the Wikitravel page on Bangkok. No problem, just add the TravelMuse bookmarket to your browser and then head to Wikitravel. Find the page you’re after, click the bookmarklet and the Wikitravel page will be added to your TravelMuse research page.

From there you can drag the outside page directly into your itinerary and all your friends and travel companions will see it as well. There’s other potentially helpful ways to use the bookmarking features — find a restaurant on Yelp, bookmark it on TravelMuse and drag it into your itinerary. Grab museum pages, Flickr photos of some out of the way sight, Thorn Tree forum pages and anything else that strikes your fancy.

The downside is that TravelMuse is definitely geared more toward vacations than what I’d call traveling. But despite a slant toward the vacationer, TravelMuse makes a nice way to bookmark and store your research, and it’s definitely a must-have for groups planning to travel together.

If you’re interested, head on over and click the “Watch Demo Video” link on the right side of the page for a quick overview of how the site works.