Group vacations to iconic destinations sound like a dream, but the work to make it happen can become a nightmare. Travefy aims to take the pain out of planning with apps that coordinate group travel.
Travefy’s co-founder and CEO, David Chait discussed travel with RewardExpert.
Founding of Travefy
While Chait was in business school at Columbia, he and his classmates would plan trips to relax and blow of steam.
“The planning and organization process was painful. The endless threads of emails…took away the joy from the trips themselves,” writes Chait.
In one instance, he was having trouble in coordinating travel arrangements for a bachelor party. Chait was convinced there must be a better way to organize travel. That’s when the idea of Travefy was born.
Chait began building Travefy in 2013 with Scott Rutz, and Matt Posvar with co-founder Chris Davis.
Travefy released a group travel planner with tools to collaborate on trip details, build itineraries, and track and collect shared itineraries. Travelers can input itineraries on the desktop planner and is those details synced to their Android or iPhone.
The Travefy team discovered the planner was popular with travel professionals who coordinated numerous trips for clients. They developed a new platform, Travefy Professional.“Travefy Pro has grown significantly and the product itself — which is now our core focus…. We help [travel professionals] save time and impress clients,” writes Chait.
What Travefy offers
Travefy developers continue to support itinerary planning for business and leisure travelers. These features are still free to use.
This itinerary viewer app, Travefy Personal, allows travelers to plan group trips and share expenses. The app allows travelers to view their itinerary online and offline and also has a messaging tool for the group to communicate within the app.
Travefy Pro, designed for travel industry professionals, is a paid service. Refer to the Travefy Pro web page for current free trial and pricing information.
“We’ve powered hundreds of thousands of trips…for over 1,000 paying travel organizations,” says Chait over email.
“In addition, there is a Trip Plans app, which is our unbranded app for the Travefy Professional platform.”
The Trip Plans app is for travel professionals’ clients to download the app and view their itinerary on-the-go. Travel professionals and clients can message each other via the app. Professionals download the Travefy Pro app and they can view their client’s itineraries and message back and forth.“Look out for additional tools that allow travel professionals to run more of their business through the Travefy platform. This includes more integrations, CRM functionality, as well as expansion of our API and developer tools,” writes Chait.
Advice on trip planning
Planning ahead makes for a more enjoyable and less frustrating travel experience, writes Chait.
Itinerary planning can be more than nailing down logistics. Rather, planning can be a chance to brainstorm destinations and come up with interesting things to do. Instead of sending rounds of emails and texts, groups can share their ideas and inspirations more easily.
Travefy allows users to create polls in the app, which makes it easier for a group to make choices every step of the way.
Another benefit comes from saving money by splitting expenses fairly. The trip organizer is often burdened with paying for hotels and reserving tours in advance.
Good planning can yield benefits — a more enjoyable and memorable trip.