Five C's for Collaborating a Group Trip

To be clear, we're talking about trip planning, the kind with planes and cars and hotels. And other stuff, like tours and activities, lunch. Perhaps, a couple of drinks. Things you like to do when you travel with friends, or family, even colleagues. Or, things your peeps suggest you do when you travel to a place they know well. If you landed here thinking we were talking about other trips, please accept our apologies.  

Collaborative trip planning can be handled in 4 easy steps, using Relovate's Trip Management Platform. It's free, btw.

Create a trip. In Relovate a trip will act like a hub, a central place where multiple planners—aka, your friends, family and colleagues, can contribute travel options. Basically, something like a Goggle® doc, but trip and travel specific. Connected invitees are controlled by the originator, or for fun, The First Collaborator. Relovate makes this simple to do with a basic email invite. Email addresses are saved, so starting collaboration on other trips is quick.

Relovate enables all planners, or Collaborators, to consider multiple travel items. Flights, hotels, car rentals, activities, tours, restaurants and more are all available for consideration in a single site. The multi-tabbed browser babble is eliminated in this way. All items considered by all parties can be viewed, in real time. A centralized view of the trip is provided and is automatically organized by location.

A private chat channel is created for every trip. It stores a complete discussion thread, alerting all parties to what another has offered. Like any form of collaborative communication, this can range from the insightful to silly. Fair warning:  Relovate has no responsibility for what you and your collaborators discuss. One common use of the chat function is to assign responsibilities for certain planning parts—for example, "Tory, you're our foodie, so why don’t you take restaurants."

At some point, its decision time. In broad strokes, you'll need a way to build and then secure some general agreement on the travel particulars. Relovate automatically stores all searches, all considered items (Relovate's version of a "save" or "like"), all notes, all dates, all locations into a simple to use "Trip Planner." Each party can view the Planner at any time, to see how the trip is shaping up. 

You can use the budget feature in Relovate to help, if money is a core driver. You can use chat to discuss any item, or all of them.

If you want more on collaboration, we suggest you visit CommunityDoor.org, a think tank on collaboration (they don't talk about collaborative travel, FYI, that's just a Relovate thing).

Any collaborating party can access a version of the trip plan.  And, they can do any of the following:

• Compete all travel bookings, individually
• Download the Itinerary to any calendar 
• View the Budget
• Share the Trip Socially

You're Ready! Go forth and be your friends First Collaborator. www.relovate.com.