About Travel Compose

My avatar

Hi, my name is Ramy and I love to travel. I've had the privilege and luck to travel several times a year over the last decade, which has allowed me to visit quite a few countries and regions around the world.

For most of my trips, I feel the need to plan my journey in advance in order to make the most of my time on location. Not having to search for where to sleep, knowing what activities to do, allows me to travel more peacefully in my opinion.

But I'm also not into excessive micro-planning and still leave room for improvisation on location, especially when it's a roadtrip (particularly in a campervan).

This detailed (but not too much) planning involves simply defining the places to visit, activities to do, routes to take, places to sleep, and assigning them to one of the four time slots of a day: morning, afternoon, evening and night.

After more than 40 trips over the last ten years, this is the system I've found most practical and adequate. It allows for serious organization without being too constraining, which could give the impression of following a tight and rigid schedule, hour by hour.

Tracking costs and expenses of a trip is also a crucial aspect that's important to me. Beyond the basic necessity of knowing where you stand in your budget, knowing how much a trip cost in total at the end often allows me to quickly inform my friends and family when they're planning to take a similar trip.

Before creating Travel Compose, my workspace for each trip was a Google Sheets spreadsheet where a column represented a day of the trip. The "Morning", "Afternoon", "Evening" and "Night" cells were filled in to give my overall schedule. Each expense was also added to the spreadsheet. This spreadsheet has been very valuable and practical over recent years but suffered from many irritating facts:
  • consulting the schedule was unpractical on the Google Sheets mobile app
  • adding multiple activities in the same time slot of the day was inconvenient as it required making line breaks within a targeted spreadsheet cell. Not very fun on a phone...
  • inability to add details about a schedule item or an expense
  • approximate total costs due to imprecise local currency conversions, and without the possibility of having an exchange rate for each day

As a software engineer, I therefore decided to create a web application, allowing me to keep my system that has served me so well during my travels, but by bringing various improvements to address the different problems that bothered me until then.

And then... since I was making an application for myself, I might as well make it useful for other travelers.

That's how Travel Compose was born!

As an active user myself, I'm committed to supporting and actively developing Travel Compose.

If you have suggestions for new features or improvements to existing ones, or if you step upon a bug, don't hesitate to contact me through the contact form.

If you appreciate the application and would like to support its development and maintenance costs (server, storage, domain name,...), feel free to Buy Me a Coffee.

Your gesture will be very much appreciated!