Bedford man launches site to make traveling with friends easier

Friday, February 3, 2012

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Bryan Marble of Bedford, founder of GroupTrip. (Submitted photo)

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A screenshot of GroupTrip’s Web site demonstrates how friends and families can plan travel details and itineraries together online.

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Bryan Marble likes to travel – and he likes doing it with friends – but there are some aspects that take the fun out of it, he admits.

Two years ago, Marble, 30, of Bedford, was deep into his Boston-based job without much time for a social life. He decided to reconnect with old friends by joining them on travel excursions, but Marble quickly found that planning trips with a group was a little frustrating.

There were plans to visit Montreal and a season filled with nine weddings, and Marble discovered that e-mail chains of 50-60 messages with debates about destinations, accommodations and restaurants made things pretty complicated.

“I just knew there had to be a better way,” Marble said.

Since then, Marble, whose background is in Web development, has been using the training he’s gained working for companies such as BAE Systems to try building a business and a Web site known as GroupTrip to allow group travel without the hassle.

“Usually you have a lot of headaches involved in planning for a group, and usually that takes away from the anticipation of the actual trip,” Marble said. “I’m trying to keep that anticipation level high.”

His site – at grouptrip.co – is still in its final development stages, Marble said, but he plans to have it fully launched by the spring.

Right now, users can create logins and use the site for free by inputting e-mail addresses or Facebook or Twitter accounts to sign in and build travel databases to share with friends.

Users first create a new trip by choosing a destination, inputting dates for when they want to travel and creating a title indicating the purpose for the trip – whether it be for a birthday celebration or a bachelorette party weekend.

From there, members can invite friends via e-mail or social media accounts to join in on the research and the conversation about the trip, using a single forum that makes planning easier, Marble said.

“It’s anywhere from choosing the dates for where you want to go to choosing where you want to stay,” Marble said. “Who’s going to book what? How are you going to get there? Are you going to meet there? Are you going to combine cars? Things like that.”

GroupTrip beats long e-mail threads that can cause ideas and links to get lost in the shuffle, Marble said.

“The basic use I envisioned when I started it is everyone’s sitting around at their 9-to-5 jobs, searching out hotels and places they want to go, and they’ll shoot it off in an e-mail,” Marble said.

“Ten e-mails later, you can’t go back and reference the data on that cool hotel you found. You’ll be able to collect all of that information in one place and to be able to comment on it and see the conversation happening in context.”

The site also will enable people to plan which attractions or restaurants they want to visit once they arrive, how far it is to get somewhere from their hotel and how they’re going to get there, Marble said.

“It’s more like a project management software, to be really boring,” Marble said. “It’s trying to get a group to make a consensus – but making it fun is the challenge.”

Once GroupTrip is complete, an itinerary function will manage the group’s daily plans and a money function will allow travelers to record their daily finances as they go.

At the end of the trip, group costs such as dinner bills and admittance fees can be split easily by the number of people participating – eliminating the constant chore of splitting checks at each meal.

Ultimately, GroupTrip will allow two categories of travelers to work together, Marble said.

“You have the people that really enjoy planning and sending out all those e-mails, and you have the people that just want to say, ‘I’ll show up, I’ll have fun no matter where we go,’” Marble said. “It enables those two groups of people to play nice together and to get equal enjoyment out of the process.”

Marble, who is working on his first startup, is the only employee for now, he said. He does most of his business development from his Bedford home but also works at abi Innovation Hub in Manchester to bounce ideas off of other inventors and entrepreneurs.

Although Marble said GroupTrip initially will appeal to 20- and 30-year-olds looking for a long-weekend getaway in the region, his largest testing group so far has been a group planning a family reunion in Ireland.

“When it gets bigger and more mainstream, I’ll spread it out more,” Marble said.

The site has been open to public use for almost two months now, Marble said, and had collected as many as 200 members by the beginning of January.

Meanwhile, Marble has been interacting with users, conducting surveys and monitoring how the site is used in order to polish it into the final product, he said.

“Eventually, I think it will get to the point where it will take over the functionality of using an e-mail,” Marble said. “It’s a tough thing to replace, because you can do so much with it, but eventually I’m hoping you can have the entire conversation on here.”

Maryalice Gill can be reached at 594-6490 or mgill@nashuatelegraph.com. Follow Gill on Twitter (@Telegraph_MAG).