TripSlap vs the spreadsheet: a loving intervention
Your trip-planning spreadsheet has served you well. It's also a disaster held together by three merged cells and hope. You can plan by hand — you just shouldn't have to build the whole system first.
Let’s be honest with each other. You have a spreadsheet named Rome FINAL v3 (real).xlsx, and it is not fine.
It was fine on day one. One tab, a few rows, a budget column you were very proud of. Then reality happened: a second tab for flights, a third for “maybe,” a cell with a hotel link that broke, and a formula that now returns #REF! for reasons known only to God.
Marco has seen this before. Marco is not here to judge. (Marco is a little here to judge.)
First, the thing people get wrong about us
TripSlap is not “AI plans your trip and you sit there.” You can absolutely build your trip by hand — day by day, activity by activity, exactly the way you’d do it in a spreadsheet. That part matters, so let’s say it clearly: manual planning is a first-class feature, not an afterthought.
The difference is what you’re building on. In a spreadsheet, before you plan a single thing, you first have to build the system — the tabs, the columns, the formulas, the little color coding that made sense at 1am. TripSlap skips that entirely, because it was designed for travel in the first place. Days, activities, budget, and map aren’t columns you invented; they’re just there. You plan the trip, not the tool to plan the trip.
What the spreadsheet is genuinely good at
Math. Budgets. Cold, honest totals. If all you need is a number, a spreadsheet is a perfectly good number.
What the spreadsheet is quietly terrible at
Everything you actually do on a trip.
- “Where are we today?” — twelve tabs and a squint.
- “How far is lunch from the museum?” — the spreadsheet does not know what a map is.
- “Are we overpacking the third day?” — the spreadsheet will happily let you schedule five museums and say nothing. A good friend would say something.
That last one is the whole difference. A spreadsheet is a container. TripSlap is a companion — your whole trip on one screen, day by day, on the map, with a budget that converts to your home currency, and a voice (Marco) who will gently note that five museums in one day is bold, darling.
And if you’d rather not do it by hand — bring in the AI
Here’s the part that isn’t in any spreadsheet: you can plan with Marco. Tell him where you’re going and what you’re into, and he’ll draft days, suggest real places, and turn “hmm, maybe add a food thing here” into an actual itinerary edit with one tap. Manual when you want control, AI when you want a first draft in thirty seconds — same trip, same screen, your call.
TripSlap vs the spreadsheet
| TripSlap | The spreadsheet | |
|---|---|---|
| Setup before planning | None — made for trips | Build tabs, columns, formulas |
| Manual planning | Yes, first-class | Yes (if you build it) |
| AI planning | Marco drafts + edits with one tap | No |
| Map view | Built in | What map? |
| Budget | Auto totals, home-currency conversion | Manual, one currency |
| “Where are we today?” | One screen | Twelve tabs |
| Price | $14.99 once | Free-ish, plus your sanity |
The migration is one conversation
You don’t need to rebuild anything. Tell Marco where you’re going, drop in what you’ve got, and the plan assembles itself — days, costs, map and all. Then edit it by hand to your heart’s content. The spreadsheet can retire with dignity.
Pay once. Plan forever. No monthly guilt — Marco would never do that to you. ✈️