I Built a Tool for Planning Long Term Slow Travel & Would Appreciate Feedback in Exchange for Free Use

**IF anyone has returned to this post. I have since added a significant number of improvements and features (maybe too many) but there is very little left in terms of realistic personal preference for destinations that i can add in. Open to suggestions if you have them though. The app will let you filter down to the nth degree no but also let you keep it completely open
I’ve been planning my slow travel future (i'm getting close to retirement) and got tired of managing and planning everything in spreadsheets (cost of living, visa limits, locations I might want to go to, moving dates, etc), so I built a planning tool for it that automates a lot of the work. You plug in some things you want and it will build out a full multi year plan with lots of rich and useful detail. It's not a booking app (yet) though. It does pull in a lot of useful information though and i've probably gone way over the top but it works for me and i don't think there's anything else out there that does planning like this…i think 🤷‍♂️

It’s not really for short trips either, it’s for multi-month/year planning.

There’s a full free demo (no credit cards or anything like that) that shows how it works and you can try almost everything in full, and I’ve added a 1 month free link inside the demo for anyone here who wants to try it. I've made it pretty cheap because I was really building it just for me originally but I'll be updating it frequently and happy to take suggestions.

I’m mainly looking for honest feedback.

What’s useful? What’s unnecessary? What’s missing? I'm a one man band building this so keep that in mind BUT if you find this useful and you want to see new features then there's a good chance i'll put it in if it fits.

Cheers, Glen 😊

The Slow Travel Planner: https://www.theslowtravelplanner.com/demo?token=27a6ea978e8e…

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  • +5

    Everyone is a vibe coder now

    • +6

      everyone is spamming ozb with their AI generated websites

      • +4

        Thankfully wisdomtooth is in the sin bin for a week. That kept some of the slop away.

        • till tomorrow

    • -1

      You should jump on board too! It seems easy (and it actually is compared to coding line by line) but once you get something half decent, you realise how much devil is in the details and it becomes significantly harder and time consuming.
      There will only be more and more vibe coded apps but that doesn't make them all bad. And really, this is how cycles come about. Everyone's a crypto trader, everyone's a Youtuber, everyone has ditched ankle socks :-/ Just take what helps you and ignore the rest.

      • What did you use to do it, and what was the workflow? Like, does it generate and entire app and you just run it, test it, and regenerate it with more specific prompts?

        • +1

          I've only tried one vibe coding attempt and it was using Claude through Zed. Asked it to generate a Python library to pull all reviews for a game from Steam and progressively write them down to a JSON file respecting API limits.

          • First prompt had a fully-working library (including documentation) however it didn't have any way of skipping duplicates/preventing loops.
          • Second prompt fixed up the duplicates and loops, but it had over-engineered one part and URL-encoded something that didn't need it.
          • Third prompt fixed that up and had a fully working review-pulling library.

          Cost me about 45 minutes in debugging and USD $0.30 in Claude credit. Would have taken me at least 3-4 hours to code myself.

          • @trankillity: Nice one! I'm surprised more people aren't doing it. It allows you to create soe amazing things. The only issue is once you start you realise all of the small things that actually make it worthwhile to a user and they can take a while to figure out and get right. People who pan vibe coding haven't done it or haven't done it well because it's not as simple as it's made out to be to get a decent product.
            Good on you for having a crack! Keep going i say.
            i just also made an investment helper and an AFL fantasy advisor. They seem simple enough to start with but the detail you have to get into and then understand what the detail should look like and not just trust the Ai makes it significantly harder. The worst thing to do is assume that what you think should happen, actually happens. It almost never does.

        • +1

          I started in Replit and went to Loveable but realised that Loveable was not ideal for this. Went to Base 44 but ended up back at Claude Code with input from Gemini and I have CoPilot at work and surprisingly, that was very helpful.
          For simple vibe coding projects, it's amazing what you can smash out but once you get more and more details it becomes challenging and I think there is an end point before the AI starts making more work than fixes so you need to have strong refraction in place and even then it's tough.

  • AI created or hand coded?

    • +1

      looks like AI, like half these tools all look the same

    • -1

      Mostly AI but a big chunk of the logic and most of the design and features is me

  • Looks useful at least as a starting point with some nice ideas in it. I'd never pay for it, but would use something like this to generate a basic framework and then go from there with my own research. If I had to pay I'd just ask ChatGPT or Gemini to do the same for me though.

    It has some weird recommendations. Like it's recommended 50 days in Kazakhstan, then also gives me a warning that this is illegal and 30 days is the maximum with no extension available. So that seems unusable.

    It would be really nice if I could have a full list of countries to select from and go from there. Your app showing me I could go to places I have no interest in isn't great when I really only want to go to say 10 in total. But can't seem to find a filter for it.

    I'd be careful about the best climate chaser option. I would actually aim for chasing the winters around the world as I think summer is ass. But your app seems to assume summer is the preferred option. I did find at some point somewhere to set the temperatures, but seems to have been lost/no idea where to find that now.

    • There's a free level but you're limited to 2 years of a plan but feel free to take advantage of that if it helps you! I'm not precious about it and happy to help..
      You can do all of that. The Trip Conditions section allows you to filter based on a whole bunch of criteria. I have no idea where you want to go so it starts with a pretty comprehensive database and then either makes suggestions or lets you curate the list.
      Yep, it does give warnings but i'm not your dad so if you still want to go somewhere then it's up to you.
      The hard part with allowing lots of preferences and budget is that there is then a finite number of cities it can recommend so it's almost always going to have to give you some options you might not expect.
      At the end of the day, it's a guide and not a written ins stone itinerary you have to follow. Let it generate something close to what you want then it's pretty easy to swap cities around and bring new ones in.
      If you prefer to do it yourself, that's ok too. It's not for everyone but maybe give it a proper go first. It may make your planning easier.

  • It's fun, some quick feedback

    • Excluding countries didn't work
    • Multiple visits to the same city during the same year. This shouldn't happen.
    • Some cities seem to come up all the time, even with minimal restrictive settings.
    • Sometimes it's getting you travelling to the other side of the world and back again during the same year. It should keep really long flights to a minimum.
    • All excellent points! And points i'm actually working through now or have put in a solution for.

      • Excluding countries didn't work
        Yep, i made an adjustment to the logic and it over-wrote some of the original logic. I've fixed it up but i noticed there are still some issues (particularly around excluded cities and countries) which i'm working on at the moment.
      • Multiple visits to the same city during the same year. This shouldn't happen.
        This should be fixed but i put in a new feature that allows you to determine the frequency of visiting the same country/city in Trip Conditions.
      • Some cities seem to come up all the time, even with minimal restrictive settings.
        This should be resolved with the point above but you also may have exhausted the options with your preferences so it then expands the search organically so it can give you a plan rather than not give you a plan and ask you to keep changing it until you get something.
      • Sometimes it's getting you travelling to the other side of the world and back again during the same year. It should keep really long flights to a minimum.
        Yep, the logic for this got broken BUT the points above have a direction of travel that you can select which should fix this.
  • Built a Tool for Planning Long Term Slow Travel & Would Appreciate Feedback

    Website too about 10 seconds to open.

    • +2

      Are you missing a k?

      • Oh k… 😲

    • Yep, trying to work out how to reduce that but it should only happen the first time and only when accessing it via the demo token link because it has to do a whole bunch of checks first. If you log in directly via https://www.theslowtravelplanner.com/ it's pretty instant

    • It is about SLOW travel, so not targeted at impatient people 😉

      • This is true but a slow page annoys me too!
        I made some changes to have more parallel loading and longer caching so the first visit should be quicker but subsequent visits should load much fastern again.

  • Looks interesting! The first time I tried it, it suggested 28 days in Karkiv, Ukraine! Maybe you should remove all of Ukraine from your list of countries…

    • That's a fair point and others have raised it. Someone's first choice was Iran! That was bad timing. But rather than tell people where they can and can't go i've chosen to include everything and then put government warnings and let people decide for themselves as safety scores don't work in these sorts of situations. Maybe you need the sounds of bombs to lull you to sleep? Who am i to judge….?
      For that reason, the UAE is still in there, US cities with bad safety, Thailand, Iran! It's hard to draw a line. Maybe actively in a war is a line? But then i'd have to remove Thailand. Mexico is in what seems like a civil war so do i remove that? Hence, user decides.

      • Maybe just use data from smart traveller, and do not recommend the Level 3 - Reconsider your need to travel & Level 4 - Do not travel countries.

        • It is data coming from smart traveller but my site is international so based on the nationality in your profile dictates what information you'll be shown (throughout the app) so I have included other government travel warnings
          I did consider only having do not travel and tidy 2 warnings but I'll see what the click through rates are for lower tier warnings and see if they're needed.

  • It'd be great if you could select multiple cities, and it gives you the shortest path that crosses each city once!

    • Yep that would be good. I can add it to the list of things to look at!
      In Trip Conditions, there is an option that sort of does that under Routing Style and you pick Nearest neighbour or a bit looser with Reginal Arcs. Most people are using this for slow travel so are staying multiple months in a location so the travel direction logic isn't quite as critical BUT i understand it is for some. I will definitely look into it.

  • I have only had a brief play around with it but I can see a lot of planning and effort has been spent creating it. It is looking good!

    A few suggestions (no particular order):
    - Some of the fonts seems very small.
    - Colour scheme looks good.
    - Would suggestion adding a mention that Step 3: Fine-Tune (Optional), also includes country / region selection.
    - I'm not sure if this is a bug or not but I when through the steps and skipped Step 3: Fine-Tune (Optional), it generated a travel plan. First stop in Iran. I then tried to change country / region, say to Asia only, but it seemed not to change the travel plan. First stop still Iran.
    - The travel plan seems to concentrate all the info in small font to the left of each section with the rest of the area just empty space. Is there a reason for this?

    • Good point about the fonts. I do have it on my list to increase the size and be responsive to the screen size. So it is coming! There is an option to increase font size in the app as well but it doesn't quite cut it i think. Hence the plan to properly fix it.
      Step 3: Fine-Tune (Optional), also includes country / region selection. - Also a good point. I only added that recently and was seeing how people took to it before announcing it. I'm doing my testing by stealth and just watching what happens. Not ideal but time is an issue.
      First stop still Iran. - If you have already generated a plan then it won't (yet) update the plan if you remove stops. Or are you saying you swapped out iran from a plan for another country and it came back? I have noticed this and have tried a fix which is not quite right yet. It does swap or remove but sometimes it takes a few seconds longer than expected. If you refresh, click off and come back it usually has updated. On rare occasions it takes 2 attempts to swap or remove. I it is on my bug list though.
      travel plan seems to concentrate all the info in small font to the left - no reason, i think it's just my porr design skills. Good feedback though. I'll have a look. I also toink i'm trying to add in too much information which is causing design issues.

      • Regarding step 3, I actually skipped that on initial set up as I thought country / region selection was later on. So it generated a plan with Iran as my first stop. I saw the start date was in 2027 so I changed the start date to March 2026. That worked fine as the plan showed me going to Iran in 2026. I then went into settings to change the country / region to Asia (the default was all countries). However, that did not seem to work as the planner did not seem to change - still Iran first stop. I think the problem is because after changing the region, I chose the "Go to Planner" button at the bottom of the screen, which I intuitively thought would refresh my plan with the changes I made.

        I see you have updated the front page. "Settings" has changed to "Trip Conditions". I see it had saved my previous selections of Asia and Oceania and created a plan from that. However, when I select North America and deselect Asia and Oceania, and then click "Go to Planner" there is no change to the countries. Still showing as Asia.

        So where is the refresh button? Or am I choosing a different region the wrong way?

        One other thing, when you start the demo, it starts at step 4 - is that intentional or should it start at step 1?

        Regarding too much information, perhaps keep the essential information and the other info can be selected or not to appear via trip conditions or as a drop down? or when hovering mouse pointer over something.

  • You do realise that with the advent of AI, everyone can just generate their personalised itinerary and travel plan themselves without using a paid subscription to a tool that doesn't have the smarts to take into account the most important criteria of travel - SAFETY!

    • Under settings > lifestyle preferences there is a setting for:

      Minimum Safety Score

      • I should've read your comment tenpercent. Would've saved me half a post! Appreciated!

    • I do, but i urge you to try and replicate what is in the app and not get frustrated with your iterations. I tired and it drove me nuts! Hence the app. BUT there are definitely people who can do this and most likely better than me. Good luck to them, they won't have an interest in my app and that's 👍
      As for safety, you can change the safety score and then each city also has a safety alert (if one exists) that is scraping from either AUS, UK, US or Canadian governments becuase these are separate to the safety score. If you know a country or city is dodgy, you can always remove them from being shown in your search results and plan.

    • I had more of a thought about the safety aspect and now i have baked in the travel safe warnings along with the already included safety score. So next to safety you can filter out cities/countries to the level you prefer in the next year to 3 years. i'd suggest only filtering on the Do Not Travel warning as all the others can be a a bit subjective i think.
      I also, made it so the countries that have do not travel warnings currently will orb red on the Dashboard map.

  • Had a quick look. Looks good. The choice of destinations is interesting.

    Some feedback:
    - Like that I can…
    add, change and remove a city.
    move cities around and for more than 1 step (?).
    see the change in weather when I move the cities.
    - When updating number of days in a city, I can’t delete the first number by tapping the back space.
    - Downloading PDF failed, no issues with CSV and my updated city swapped was in the correct spot.

    I was on my mobile.

    • Hi Fenikkusu

      Thanks for the feedback. I just fixed the day editing so that should be good to go.
      My bad with the pdf, I made some changes and forgot to deploy the update. You should be able to export to pdf now 👍🏻

      • Deleting number of days is fixed now.

        Still can’t export PDF. Maybe it’s a Safari thing on mobile…?

        • Sorry, i completed missed this. You're better off sending a message via the app.
          I tried in Chrome, Firefox and Edge and the PDF generated fine for me. Maybe Safari?

  • My feedback using chrome:
    - When opening the webpage from your link it creates an itinerary knowing nothing about me. It should open to trip conditions first.
    - The Itinerary it calculated for me had me visiting Aachen 3 times. Karkiv twice and also Odessa twice.
    - It routed me to Asia, then across to Africa and then back to Asia, then back to Africa. This doesn't feel sensible.

    Moving on to Trip Conditions
    - It's not clear when setting the trip budget if it is total cost or per person, until you move to daily budget.
    - When it does work out the daily spend per person, it says that "Daily budget: $XXX per person/day. Cities above this daily amount are filtered out." This doesn't work well for most people. Surely you can spend part of your trip in more expensive cities and others in lower cost cities as long as you are within your total budget?
    - I put in 5 years, but the results are still 10 years after clicking go to planner.
    - as others have said, the plans know you are overstaying your visa and warn you "Abu Dhabi, UAE: 49 days planned, Visa limit is 30 days with no extension available. 19d over limit." But with the planner knowing this why does it plan to overstay?
    - Changing the home base appears to have no effect on the results, still shows Melbourne after clicking go to planner.
    - Changing travel pace to moderate appears to have no effect, going back to Trip conditions it is back on Slow after clicking go to planner.
    - Even putting in a budget of $100k per year, and all cities, countries, & sizes, it still does not include a single capital or large city anywhere in the world for a 5 year trip.
    - Is there any consideration as to where most people visit? There was nothing at all in China, Japan. USA, Canada, France, Italy, Spain, South Pacific, etc.
    - Each year only visited one city in each country (may be a side effect of not being able to lock in moderate and keeps reverting to slow).
    - Even though I said I own my own home in my home town it was budgeting $320 a day while we were at home, and $220 a day for a more expensive city like Aachen Germany.
    - Assuming you are aiming this at a worldwide audience, as you allow currency selection, there does not seem to be a lookup function for home city. There are many places in the world with the same name, even within the same country.

    It was not obvious that after making changes in trip conditions when then clicking on go to planner, it does not update the planner with your new conditions (apart from Budget I think).

    I will be planning slow travel shortly myself, this is a good start, but doesn't really have enough to be useful. Apart from the issues above, there is not a lot of personalisation for the types of places you want to visit, other than city size and climate. would be good to set preferences for coastal, mountains, inland, historical, modern, museums, busy, laid back, etc. People have very broad tastes and the random output I received would not be a starting point for my planning.

    • Hi petestrash
      Thanks for the every l very detailed feedback. I really appreciate it
      I think a lot of the issues happened in a window where I made some refinements but accidentally removed some logic. I think I have this fixed now so your entire Chrome feedback section should now be fixed.
      I might have to make it clearer that the default starting position is per person for the budget and adding extra people has a multiplier. Truth be told, adding extra people doesn't add a whole lot of value as I think most people will start with a known budget (this feature only helps those who need help withing their budget out). It's easiest to just use 1 person and enter your known budget.
      The travel pace change issue was linked to the issue above so should be fixed. As an FYI, of your have a slow travel plan created then go back and just changed the setting to moderate page, it won't twist everything automatically. I recommend, just generating a new separate plan or overwriting your existing one of not needed anymore.
      "Even putting in a budget of $100k per year, and all cities, countries, & sizes, it still does not include a single capital or large city anywhere in the world for a 5 year trip" l. Yep the may happen. There are 1000+ cities in the database. I promise they're in there! You can always just click on a city in your plan that you don't want and use the swap function to replace with somewhere you want.
      Let me look at the home town budget calculation, that doesn't seem right and might still be including accommodation costs and keeping everything else at 100% 👍🏻
      "there does not seem to be a lookup function for home city. There are many places in the world with the same name, even within the same country." Sorry I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Are you referring to the home base field in trip planner? If so, I think you're right. It needs to be more clear. I'll fix that up.
      I've started adding in those more granular details for people to search. I'll be adding more as I get access to reliable data sources that are up to date.
      If you look now, you'll see there's a lot more then when you posted this.
      I really appreciate the detail you went into. I hope you continue to give it a go and if you reach out directly the track when it's even more feature rich, is be happy to give you another coffee for free pro access.

  • -4

    Ah. The classic solution no one asked for in search of a problem no one had.

    I'm building an AI to advice me when to switch my super to fixed interest.

    It “analyses” global conflict metrics, oil price fluctuations and braking news events.

    After wiring in all the inputs and building a full forecasting engine, I realised I could just replace everything with a random number generator and the output was statistically identical.

    • +2

      It's a problem I have…

      Some of us actually plan long term and want to retire early and spend 50+ years travelling.

      • I don't get it. I only came here to see if anyone does. Found you :)

        Is "slow travel" a thing? What is it? Like travel, but incorporating relocating as well (re "moving dates") ??

        I do a bit of travel, and will continue in retirement, but always have a home base to return to, and take a break between trips.
        Checking cost of living and visa limits are just a part of planning a trip - which is part of the fun.

        I guess I'll check out the website and see what I'm missing here.

        • +1

          I've been slow travelling for 3 years now, about 2-3 months per trip and 2 trips a year (2xNZ, Europe, Japan and USA, about to go back to Europe if Abu Dhabi opens up in 5 weeks).
          Our format for slow travel fits well into the ozbargain mentality as costs are super low, airfares are the biggest expense. Cost for 2-3 months for 2 people for airfares, accomodation and ground transport of around 3000+km (ie all expenses but food, as you'd be spending that anyway) so far is $4k- $12k per trip.
          Best part of slow travel is you get time to meet and stay with locals, which is something money can't buy.

          • +1

            @affable: This is the way I prefer to travel, but don't have the $$ to do it for the duration you guys do. Gotta say though, $4K is incredible for a 2-month holiday. We spend twice that for half the time.

            • +1

              @SlickMick: Do you own your home? If you do, you can travel for free by renting out your home. We don't need to do that, however I know people who have even made a profit as they have fancy beach homes they Airbnb.

            • +1

              @SlickMick: Slowing your travel can make it cheaper in some ways. Your accommodation daily rate is often significantly cheaper and if you get a place with a kitchen you can get some groceries which over a month adds up to quite a bit of savings. Obviously you can't compare a 2 week holiday with a 2 month holiday but the daily rate can be significantly cheaper 👍🏻

            • @SlickMick: I'm looking at including a section on how to fund your slow travel (not side hustles) with house sitting, house swap, pet sitting and other things that i don't know about yet. I'm still working on that though. So $4k for 2 months might actually be super more than comfortable.

          • @affable: How good and cheap is slow travelling through Japan! Somewhere like Nagoya being a big city and easyish access to Osaka/Kyoto an Tokyo is exceedingly cheap, you can even buy an older but half decent 1 bedroom apartment for $30k if you are going to be a frequently returning traveller instead of renting! Only issue besides ongoing monthly payments is there is not a whole lot to do in Nagoya.

        • Slow travel is essentially staying in places for longer than you would on a "standard" holiday. For me, it means staying 2-6 months in a destination and living in the town as a "local" (as much as you can).
          It's not for everyone and you definitely need to generate income or wait until retirement Or be very wealthy to do it.

    • +1

      It's a problem I have which is why i built it. I figured i put so much time and effort into it i may as well put it out there. Just as an FYI, i currently have about1000 demo account users in a under a week with just single posts in a few forums so there is clearly a niche market for it even if you aren't a fan. I don't expect to get rich. No need to be a hater Jimbo.

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