DuffelUp.com Blog

The past week’s Daily Duffels were packed with unique, interesting and useful information for travelers, wanderers and locals alike.  DD’s burned bright in our Twitter feed and zipped around our online community, but in case you missed a day or two, here’s a quick rundown:

1) In a demonstration of how Duffel can be used for more that just travel planning, mike mora took us on a unique tour of things to do and places to hang in NYC in A New York Sip: http://duffelup.com/trips/a-new-york-sip

2) Dana showed us how organizing and laying out your trip itinerary is a cinch, and the freedom that the bookmarklet tool brings to this process in Rome, Italy: http://duffelup.com/trips/dana

3) Interesting Pacific Northwest activities abounded in Christine Srivongse’s Portland Weekend: http://duffelup.com/trips/portland-weekend

4) We got to ride shotgun up the California coast with Amy Hanoa in her Duffel Norcal Roadtrip: http://duffelup.com/trips/norcal-roadtrip You can see her comments on the trip below in the 1/27/10 edition of the Duffelup Journal.

5) Stefano and his girlfriend took Vegas (or so tried) in a Bourdain-inspired visit to Sin City in Taking Vegas: http://duffelup.com/trips/taking-vegas See his comments and photo in yesterday’s Journal below.

6) And just today equeq tuned us in to some mad Miami-Dade eats and drinks knowledge sure to benefit those partaking in local Superbowl festivities in Eatery&Bars-Miami: http://duffelup.com/trips/eatery-bars-miami

Have a Duffel you want to share?  Email evan@duffelup.com.  Duffelup and Go!

Daily Duffels are users’ Duffels (either future, present or past) that we feature in our online community because we think they look fun, interesting and well put together. To see all of our Daily Duffels, follow us on Twitter.

Note from the Admin: Stefano’s Duffel was selected “Daily Duffel” for 1/28/10. Daily Duffel Creators are invited to comment on their experiences for the Duffelup Journal.  This is what Stefano had to say:

We had a great trip in Vegas. It was a ton of fun just organizing my thoughts on duffelup, placing restaurants, hotels, etc - and then letting the gatekeeper - aka “the girlfriend” organize it all and turn it into a cohesive trip. Unfortunately, despite the duffel’s name, we didn’t take vegas - vegas took us.

(Stefano and his girlfriend taking Vegas)

Thanks Stefano…I know the feeling!  There’s nothing quite like that flight home from Vegas.  You can view Stefano’s Duffel here: Taking Vegas

Daily Duffels are users’ Duffels (either future, present or past) that we feature in our online community because we think they look fun, interesting and well put together. To see all of our Daily Duffels, follow us on Twitter.

Note from the Admin: Amy’s Duffel was selected “Daily Duffel” for 1/27/10. Daily Duffel Creators are invited to comment on their Duffelup experiences for the Duffelup Journal.  This is what Amy had to say:

During my boyfriend’s vacation here in California, I decided to plan the quintessential roadtrip up from LA to Northern California to show him the sights and visit a few friends.  We kept throwing out ideas about what we wanted to do, who we wanted to see, and the stuff we wanted to eat… but nothing was getting solidified.

I took it upon myself to play the troop leader and started packing my “Duffel Up.” Since we were constantly on the move and meeting up with a few different people during our trip, the public board was a great way to link everyone and let them see when and where we were going to be at all times. This allowed us to plan accordingly and still get to do everything we originally planned.

All in all, the trip was a major success. We got to bowl all night, be awesome at Lasertag (I took 1^st place!), run around a huge trampoline arena, and eat great food with some amazing friends. If anyone needs some ideas for their trip to the Bay Area, check out my Duffel.  :-D

Very cool Amy!  You can view Amy’s Duffel here: Norcal Roadtrip!

Daily Duffels are users’ Duffels (either future, present or past) that we feature in our online community because we think they look fun, interesting and well put together. To see all of our Daily Duffels, follow us on Twitter.

Creating a public duffel isn’t just a chance to show off your duffelup skills, it can also be a very informative resource for fellow users.  And it may be featured as a “Daily Duffel” in our Twitter community, or elsewhere in the future.  Even if you aren’t actually planning on going anywhere, duffelup someplace you’ve been, or a restaurant list, or somewhere you would like to go one day.  Have fun and let the creative juices flow.

The perfect vacation at Wailea Beach Marriott Resort & Spa in Maui.  Check out the duffel.

Photo by Will C.

It has been a while since we last updated.  Apologies - we’ve been busy cranking out exciting new features.  One of the new features is the Duffel Widget (which you can see on the right).  It is a list of your “active trips” or “active duffels”, depending on whether you use Duffel to plan your trips or to save your favorite spots (or both).  If you want to grab one for yourself, go to http://duffelup.com/site/tools and start showing off your itineraries!

As everyone was enjoying their Halloween weekend, we were working away and quietly released a handful of new feature that further improves your trip planning experience.  First off, we redesigned our city pages to provide you with activities and hotel recommendations.  Secondly, Duffel is more social, thanks to sharing capabilities with Facebook and Twitter.  Thirdly, our bookmarklet tool is better and smarter for easier web clipping.  There are many more new and hot features, which we’ll try to summarize them for you below.

All new city page

As you can see from our New York City page, we have significantly improved the look and feel.  Not only are there “profile pictures” for every duffel, we also have a slew of activities and hotels recommendations for you, hand-picked from our partners.  Now you can browse through other travelers’ duffels as well as activities and hotels all on one page.

Sharing and Favorites

We know you want to share with friends and family that perfect trip you planned, and we make it easy.  With a click on the “Share” button, you can instantly post a message on your Facebook wall or Twitter account.

Find an interesting itinerary built by your friend or another duffeler?  Favorite it and it will show up under your favorites collection.

Smarter Bookmarklet

Forget copy & paste!  Our new Clip-It tool automatically picks up your highlights on a website.

Google Search your duffel map

Are you looking for the closest coffee shop from your hotel?  Use Google’s search right on your duffel map!  You can also add the search results to your duffel directly without copying and pasting, making your trip planning even easier.

And many more…

There are many more exciting new stuff on Duffel, so why not check them out!

This is the first of the how-to / tips & tricks series. How-to series are created to educate users on how to maximize the potential of using Duffel. Hope you’ll find them helpful!

Problem: When I was planning my trip to Greece, I realized that I need walking & driving directions from point to point. How do I save this in my duffel? This post illustrates the utilization of Google Maps driving direction and its application to your trip planning process. The tutorial assumes that you print out your duffels using “print view” and carry them while traveling. Follow the procedure below and you’ll have a good-looking print view with driving directions.

1) Find driving / walking directions on maps.google.com. In this example, I’m plotting directions from SFO International Airport to San Francisco, Ca.

2) After the direction has been plotted, click the “Link” link on the top right of the map. Copy the HTML in “Past HTML to embed in website”.

3) Go to your duffel and add a Note. Paste the HTML in the Note body. (Optional) Since I like large maps, I changed the width to “600” (from “425”) and height to “600” as well (from “350”). You can also add any note you need to the beginning or the end of the HTML; I pasted the actual text of the driving direction.

4) Save the Note, and it will look something like this (pretty ugly, I know).

5) Fear not. The final print view looks much prettier.

Hope this is helpful getting driving directions in your duffels. You can also look at a real-life example here (grid view here). Enjoy!

The day finally arrived.  After a year and half of eating, breathing and living Duffel, and nine months of interacting with our favorite Beta testers, we finally launched at TechCrunch50 DemoPit on last week!  To say that we were nervous is a drastic understatement — we were scared sh-tless (pardon our French, though we do love France).  Despite the staying up late and waking up in a cold sweat, launching at TC50 was one of the best experiences we could have hoped for.  People loved our intuitive interface and were fascinated by the ease of use, but perhaps most rewarding of all, they shared Duffel’s vision and gave invaluable feedback.  Sometimes being entrepreneur takes a little bit of “crazy” and it’s comforting to know that we weren’t alone.  Besides, earning Jack Arrington’s (Michael’s father) poker chip was one of the events that made our day a bit different than ordinary.

A big thanks to our die-hard fans who helped to make this day happen.  Duffel would not have been what it was without your support and feedback.  Thank you for your passion.  Thanks for all the buzz on Twitter and Facebook, and if you haven’t had a chance to, you can follow us on Twitter @duffelup and fan us on Facebook.  Moreover, thanks to our stellar Duffel team who believed in Duffel and worked endlessly around the clock - you are the brain of Duffel.  And finally, thanks to TechCrunch50 for putting up a great show.  It was absolutely an eye-opening experience.

As part of the launch, we did put in quite a bit of interesting features.  The list goes on, but first off, we gave our homepage a fresh face-lift.  It is now more interactive and inviting - do you agree?  We are also integrated with Facebook Connect, so now you can invite and share with Facebook friends.  And of course, you also can sign up using a Facebook account.  Besides the new features, we made quite a bit of changes to improve our trip planning dashboard, as well as gave users recommended activities to kick start their travel research.  We’d love your feedback on these.

Despite the successful launch, we’re not stopping here.  There are still a lot of work to do, problems to solve, and challenges to overcome.  Our vision - to build the most flexible trip planner for every traveler - remains unwavering.  We are stronger than ever, and we are here to make a difference.  Stay tuned - we’ve got more exciting news coming!

I’ve been hesitant to tweet about Duffel.  Actually, I’ve been hesistant to publicly market Duffel in general, mostly because I feel it isn’t ready for prime time yet.  But as the founder and developer, I know I’ll always be “unready.”  The day I launched private beta, I was kicking and screaming about how it wasn’t ready - but it had to be done and I thought if anything screwed up, at least it would be limited to a small set of users.

Months later, all the hard work and attention to details paid off.  Duffelup.com is still running and we didn’t lose the database!  More importantly, we’ve been quietly hitting milestones, adding new features and tweaking the interface, despite a few life events and setbacks.  Every pending milestone, I would attempt make it our public beta release; but everytime we reach the milestone, I would start feeling uneasy and push back the big day.

Well, I’m still not convinced that we’re ready yet.  However, I want to come out of the closet and slowly start writing about Duffel in open public, whether through this blog or via Twitter.  We have a great marketing consultant leading this effort, so tweets will be plentiful and interesting.  Because Duffel is a visually stimulating tool, not only will we blog and tweet, we will also start collecting stunning travel photos submitted by strangers around the globe.  Most people look for travel inpsiration through photos - we want to nuture that inspiration.

Having said all that, please follow us on Twitter for site updates, new features, travel tips and interesting nuggets.  Also check back this blog for more verbose version of the tweets.