I spent three months planning one trip. Then I built the thing that does it in a minute.

This past May, my husband and I took two weeks in Japan for our first anniversary. I started planning it three months out.

I'm a foot and ankle surgeon. He's an engineer. Between us there isn't much free time, which is exactly why the trips we do take have to be right.

I'm also the person who needs an agenda — and the person quietly terrified of missing the one thing we'd have loved most. So I researched. After clinic, on weekends, for hours. Forty browser tabs. A spreadsheet. A Google Doc I still won't show anyone.

The planning I could survive. What broke me was keeping track of it: confirmation emails three folders deep, a PDF for the ryokan, a screenshot for the train, and a reservation I could not find while standing in the middle of Kyoto Station.

So partway through, I stopped fighting the spreadsheet and built us something instead. Just for that trip. Just for us.

Then we actually went

And the trip started telling me what I'd missed. It told me outside a restaurant with no signal, trying to remember what time we'd booked. It told me again when the best hour of the whole two weeks turned out to be somewhere no list had mentioned. And it told me every time I wanted the plan, the tickets and the map to be in one place I could open with one thumb, and they weren't.

Every one of those moments is a feature now.

An itinerary built for you, not for everyone

You say where and when, and it writes the whole trip back to you — day by day, morning to evening — around what you actually want to see, at the pace you actually walk, inside the hours you're actually awake. Not the same ten things everybody else gets handed.

Then it does the part I was bad at. Your days come mapped stop by stop, and the map still works when your signal doesn't. Every ticket and confirmation lives in one place instead of three folders deep. The things you need before you need them — currency, tap water, transit, the real forecast for your dates — are already waiting, and so are the places most people walk straight past. And when you see a restaurant in a reel and know you'll have forgotten it by morning, you put it on your Radar, and it's there when you sit down to plan.

And a genie who knows your trip

Don't like Tuesday? Make a wish and it rewrites the day. Can't remember your seat number? Ask — it read your boarding pass when you uploaded it. Lost somewhere in the app? Ask that too.

ChatGPT gives you a plan.
WanderGenie gives you a trip that's still there when you land.

That's the whole difference. A chat thread doesn't know your flight number, doesn't hold your reservations, and isn't there when you're standing in Gion with no bars.

And if you have no idea where to go

Answer a few honest questions and it will point you somewhere. Sometimes that's a city you'd already half-decided on. Sometimes it's a place you've never heard of, and you spend the rest of the evening wondering how you hadn't.

Those are my favorite trips. The ones you didn't know to want.

Why I keep working on it

I built this because I love planning and it still exhausted me. Most people don't love planning. Almost nobody has three months. And an itinerary shouldn't cost you the evenings you were going to spend looking forward to the trip.

Travel, for me, is what being alive actually feels like — not moving from one place to another, but stepping outside everything familiar and feeling the pulse of somewhere that isn't yours. It opens your eyes and it changes your mind, and I wanted more people to get to that part.

I'm still building it, most nights, so that your next trip is better than my first one was. If something's wrong or missing, tell me — there's a feedback button in the app and it comes straight to me.

— Sahar