Trippy lets your Facebook friends help plan your next vacation

Planning a trip is difficult, there’s a lot of homework to do on places, especially if you’ve never been. There are a ton of books and of course you have Google to search for all of the cool places to go.

However, wouldn’t it be nice if your friends could plan your trip for you based on their experiences?

That’s what Trippy is for. The company has a site and an iOS app that lets you set a location of where you’d like to travel to. You can share that with your social graph and let people jump in and suggest places for you to go.

Trippy points out that getting advice from strangers isn’t fool proof, especially on the internet, so why not leave it up to your Facebook friends?

The company was a finalist in the TechCrunch disrupt 2011 Startup Battlefield. launched as a finalist in the TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2011 Startup Battlefield. The company CEO and Founder, J.R. Johnson, has had 2 startups acquired by Expedia in 2008.

Start a new trippy trip

Even if you don’t have set dates on when you’d like to go to a certain location, it’s nice to dream about it, right? Trippy lets you set up as many trips as you like to share with friends. Setting up is easy, just choose a location, the reason for the travel, and pre-fill in some description on why you’re getting away if you like.

Adding the reason for travel is a nice touch, because not all of your friends have gone to these places for the same reason. Some have gone for business, for school, or for a romantic getaway. Choosing why you’re going is key, so don’t skip it.

Once you’ve set up your dream trips, you can share them to Facebook, Twitter, or just with a link through email. This link drops people on a landing page where they can sign up for Trippy and then start recommending places for you to check out. They’re given a search box for the location only, so it’s easy to start adding places for your potential itinerary.

Help your friends plan their trip

Once you’ve set your dream trips up and shared, hopefully you have some of your friends on Trippy doing the same. This makes things fun, but I fear that if none of your friends sign up, you won’t come back to the site to add more trips. Since you can post to Facebook and Twitter though, there’s a good shot that your friends will at least try the service out.

It does take a lot of work to even think about a vacation, let alone plan one, so we think Trippy might be onto something here.

In case you’re not sold yet, here’s a video from the company explaining Trippy:

The company also has an iOS app, but quite honestly I wasn’t able to figure out how to use it. I would search on locations and it would bring back results close to me in San Francisco. The user experience isn’t great on iOS app, but the website is clean and straight forward, so it might be best to stick with that.