I released a pretty big upgrade to the Eurotrip Planning application today. If you already have a trip planned, you will not notice much of a change other than a slightly faster interface.

The main upgrade is in the way that the Eurotrips are initially created. Before, you had to become a member and then create a trip and then add all of your details. This way did not allow you to try out the application without saving a trip to eurotrip.com.

I have changed the trip planner to work as follows:
Anyone, a member or a guest, can use the trip planning application.
This allows guests to try out the application before they become a member to make sure that is will be of value to them.

When you create the trip initially it is stored on your local machine in the form of a cookie for a month (you can delete it if you like), and it is only put public on eurotrip.com if you Save it.
This allows people who just want to play with the application to get ideas and map out routes to be able to do this without having their plans published to eurotrip.com. If you are not logged in and you want to save your trip to eurotrip.com, you will be asked to login or register for the trip to be saved.

Save your trip to eurotrip.com to publish it and get feedback from the community.
Once you have planned out what you think you want to do, save your trip to get feedback from the community.

Hopefully this will help reduce the number of trips that get created and then never used because the application is not what the user was expecting.

Enjoy and let me know if you have comments or questions…