Comparison

Group travel apps compared: planners, splitters and polls

Most groups end up running a trip across three or four tools: a chat thread for the arguing, a planner for the itinerary, a splitter for the money, and a spreadsheet holding it together. Here is what each category actually does well, and where the seams are.

The five kinds of tool

Itinerary planners

Wanderlog, TripIt, Google Travel

Good at: Collecting places, day-by-day plans, bookings in one place, and, in Wanderlog's case, tracking and splitting expenses afterwards.

Gap: The plan and the split are separate manual jobs. Who went on the boat trip and who pays for it are disconnected until someone connects them afterwards. But in The Triptych, voting and paying are part of the SAME decision — automatically.

Expense splitters

Splitwise, Tricount, Settle Up

Good at: Recording what was paid after the fact, converting currencies, and reducing the mess to a short list of who pays whom.

Gap: Often happen when the event is history. The app doesn't know who went on what. Somebody has to re-enter the participants for every single item.

Polls and chat

WhatsApp polls, Doodle, a group thread

Good at: Fast, free, and everybody is already there.

Gap: Decisions scroll away, majority-rules polls force people into things they don't want, and nothing carries through to costs.

A shared spreadsheet

Google Sheets, Excel

Good at: Infinitely flexible, and free.

Gap: One person maintains it, nobody else opens it, and the formulas break the moment somebody drops out of one activity.

Social planners and booking apps

Trips Together, Troupe

Good at: Getting the trip out of the group chat, finding dates everyone can do, shortlisting and voting on AI suggestions, booking through partner travel brands, and afterwards logging shared expenses to create a running balance.

Gap: The voting selects a single answer for the whole group and the expense log is typed in by hand. Majority rule. Disconnects decisions from costs.

The seam nobody covers

Every one of those categories is competent inside its own lane. The friction is at the JOIN — for any event, voting yourself 'In' and accepting the costs should be part of the same decision. But those things are often held in different apps, or else entered twice, by hand, usually by one person.

That is the break The Triptych is built to fix. Each idea is a proposal you opt into or out of. Voting 'In' is also the cost allocation — nobody re-keys a participant list, and nobody pays for the boat trip they skipped.

What that means in practice

No majority rules. If you want in, you're in; if you don't, you're out and you aren't billed for it.
A shared calendar shows what is confirmed, what is still someone's idea, and where a new plan would clash — before anyone commits.
Costs and ad hoc spends are recorded in whatever currency they were paid in and converted to the trip currency, so there is no second expense app.
Settle-up at the end is a short list of real per-person amounts, not a group average.

Where we're weaker

Honestly: if what you need is just a day-by-day itinerary app with bookings pulled in from your inbox, a dedicated planner could do that for you. And if you want a rapidly generated "do this, here, then do this" itinerary that everyone follows along with, regardless of choice, then a generic AI trip-planning app will fit the requirement.

If the group hasn't settled the dates or the destination yet, a social planner like Trips Together does that stage well.

Where we think we're stronger

If the basics are already established in the chat and the excitement is building, then group ideas flow anyway and everyone gets their say inside The Triptych.

Everyone can get involved, propose and discuss ideas in a shared space, organise activities, accommodation, and travel together, do your own thing when the choices are different and meet back up when they align.
Nobody is tied to the 'group plan' for everyone else's convenience but they still know what others are doing, when and where.
Each member's individual trip debts are shown 'live' and available both in-trip and at the end — everything transparent AND fairly split, based on who did what.

This is where The Triptych earns its place in your pocket — the tool that genuinely facilitates co-ordinated group travel and keeps participation synched to payments and debts.