Resources
Honest writing
about planning trips with other humans.
Group trips fail in predictable ways. Most travel content pretends otherwise. We don't. Below: the operating manual, real itineraries, what AI can and can't do for a trip, and short notes from the team building Wendir.
Manual
The Group Trip Operating Manual
Evergreen playbook for planning a trip without being the unpaid PM.
- Manual7 min read
The 80% consensus rule: why majority-vote group decisions break trips
Most group trips run on "majority wins." That's the wrong rule. Here's the threshold that actually lands decisions without resentment — and the three things you have to define before any vote happens.
The Wendir team - Manual6 min read
The 4 roles every group trip needs (and the one that's always missing)
Most group trips assume roles instead of naming them. Here are the four — decider, scout, local, treasurer — what each one actually does, and which one your group is currently failing to fill.
The Wendir team - Manual8 min read
Group trip Slack vs WhatsApp vs Discord: what actually works
Almost every group trip starts in a group chat. Most stay there, even when it stops working. Here's an honest comparison of the four tools people actually use — and the bigger point: the chat isn't the problem, but using it as the workspace is.
The Wendir team - Manual11 min read
How to plan a group trip without becoming the unpaid PM
The honest playbook: how to plan a 4–10 person trip without one person ending up running the whole thing, fronting the money, and chasing the votes.
The Wendir team - Manual9 min read
How to split travel expenses when one person fronted everything
Someone always ends up putting it on their card — the Airbnb deposit, the rental car, the group dinner. Here's the honest math, the social contract you should set first, and the algorithm that turns twelve receipts into three transfers.
The Wendir team
Comparison
Wendir vs the Alternatives
Honest comparisons — including what Wendir doesn't do.
- Comparison7 min read
Wendir vs Splitwise: do you need both?
Splitwise is the gold standard for splitting expenses between friends. Wendir splits expenses AND handles the rest of the trip. Here's the honest comparison — when Splitwise alone is right, when Wendir replaces it, and when both make sense.
The Wendir team - Comparison6 min read
Wendir vs TripIt: solo travel vs group travel
An honest comparison of Wendir and TripIt. TripIt is the best email-to-itinerary tool for solo and business travel. Wendir is built for groups. Here's how to choose — and why most people end up needing both for a while.
The Wendir team - Comparison8 min read
Wendir vs Wanderlog: which group trip planner should you use?
An honest comparison of Wendir and Wanderlog for group trip planning. Where each one wins, what each one doesn't do, and how to choose based on what your crew actually needs.
The Wendir team
Destination
Destination Deep-Reads
Real itineraries with real expense breakdowns. One destination per piece.
- Destination12 min read
Mexico City for 5 people, 4 days, no Spanish
A real planning template for a 5-person group trip to Mexico City when nobody in the crew speaks Spanish. The neighbourhood pick, the booking strategy, the translation tools that actually work, and the day plans that survive the language barrier.
The Wendir team - Destination11 min read
Sydney long-weekend for a hens: the spreadsheet that worked
A real planning template for organising a 6-8 person hens weekend in Sydney without ending up as the maid-of-honour-PM. Day plans, accommodation, expense math, the booked anchors that survive contact with 8 different opinions.
The Wendir team - Destination13 min read
Kyoto in 3 days for 4 people: a composite planning doc
Not a top-10 list. A composite planning document built from real Kyoto trips and beta tester runs — day sequencing, what gets voted off, illustrative expense math, and what we'd change next time. Useful as a template for your own Kyoto trip.
The Wendir team - Destination9 min read
Tokyo for friends with three different food tolerances
Planning Tokyo with a vegetarian, a coeliac, and someone with shellfish allergies — without anyone eating convenience-store onigiri for the fifth time in a row. The neighbourhood logic, the booking strategy, and the rules we set before flying.
The Wendir team
AI
AI Trip-Planning Reality Check
Honest takes on what AI can and can't do for a group trip.
- AI9 min read
Why most "AI trip planners" are wrappers — and what a real agent system looks like
A wave of "AI trip planners" launched in the last 18 months. Most are a single LLM behind a chat UI. Here's the structural difference between a wrapper and a system, why it matters for trip planning specifically, and how to tell which kind you're using.
The Wendir team - AI7 min read
Citations vs hallucinations: how Wendir's agents flag what they don't know
Every AI claim in Wendir ships with the agent's name, a citation link, and a confidence pill — HIGH, VERIFY, or LOW. Here's why we built it that way, what each level actually means, and how a user is supposed to act on the difference.
The Wendir team - AI10 min read
What ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude get wrong when you ask them to plan a group trip
Three frontier LLMs, one prompt: "plan a 3-day group trip to Kyoto for 4 friends with mixed budgets and dietary needs." The kinds of output each produces, what they all structurally fail at, and the architectural reason a single chatbot can't plan a group trip well — drawn from documented LLM behaviours and our own repeated testing while building Wendir.
The Wendir team
Dispatch
Founder Dispatches
Short, signed posts from the team building Wendir.
- Dispatch5 min read
Why iOS first when Splitwise scaled on Android
Splitwise grew on Android. So did Uber. So did WhatsApp. We're shipping Wendir on iOS first anyway. Here's the reasoning — pragmatic, not ideological — and the honest cost of the decision.
The Wendir team - Dispatch4 min read
Why we're building Wendir
A short note on the trip that broke us, the moment we realised every group trip we'd ever taken ended the same way, and why we're building Wendir instead of just complaining about Splitwise.
The Wendir team