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 four kinds of tool

Itinerary planners

Wanderlog, TripIt, Google Travel

Good at: Collecting places, building a day-by-day plan, keeping bookings in one place.

Gap: They assume the whole group does the whole itinerary. There is no per-item opt-in, so there is no honest answer to 'who is actually coming to the boat trip, and who pays for it?'

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: They start after the money is gone. Nobody in the app knows who agreed to what, so 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.

The seam nobody covers

Every one of those categories is competent inside its own lane. The friction is at the join: the decision about who is coming to a thing and the calculation of who pays for that thing are the same fact, held in two different apps, entered twice, by hand, usually by one person.

That is the specific gap The Triptych is built for. Each idea is a proposal you opt into or out of, and being in for a proposal is what puts its cost on your side of the ledger. The vote is 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 beautiful day-by-day itinerary app with bookings pulled in from your inbox, a dedicated planner does that for you. If you want an auto-generated "do this, here, then" itinerary that everyone follows along with regardless of choice, then a generic AI trip-planning app will fit the requirement.

But we hope you'd rather have a versatile, organisational tool that genuinely co-ordinates your group to plan your trip together and addresses the "who's actually in for this and wants to get involved in making it happen?".

Where you can propose and discuss ideas in a shared space, organise activities, accommodation, and travel together, split away when the choices are different and meet back up when they align. Where nobody is tied to the 'group plan' for everyone else's convenience but they still know what others are doing, when and where. And where all the trip spending is logged immediately and fairly split when the trip ends … then this is where The Triptych earns its place in your pocket.