Jamie Biesiada
When groups are planning trips, travel advisor Julie Day has found that one of the most common places for everything to fall apart is during the budget discussion.
What is the budget? Who will handle it? How much should each traveler put in, and how long do they have to save?
Well, good news: There's an app for that. Day built it.
Day, who alternates living between Canada and the U.S. (Edmonton and Scottsdale, Ariz.), founded Gatherwell Travel in the beginning of this year after spending the last 20 years booking travel for herself, friends and family as a hobby. With her youngest child graduating from high school this year, the time felt right to jump into a new venture.
She's looking to home in on multigenerational family trips. She sees a lot of opportunity in that space, with many grandparents and parents wanting to give their children and grandchildren memories that will last a lifetime. Her ultimate goal is to inspire more people to travel together.
Initially, she planned a series of educational videos on planning group trips. She filmed the first on how to get organized and gather everyone's dates.
"And then I got to the budget, and I was like, 'Huh, yeah, that's actually a pretty big barrier for people,'" she said.
She set out to remove that friction from the process, and the Gatherwell Travel app was born.
The app enables travelers to create budget items across categories, including accommodations, transportation and food. It tracks who's paid for what and who still owes funds; the organizer of the trip receives funds via electronic transfer to Venmo or a bank account.
Group chats can be connected to the app and spreadsheets with all expenses can be exported.
"This just keeps it all in one place, and it's easy to use and it's fun," Day said. "It keeps the whole thing fun and light and not awkward."
It's free to download and use. Day uses it with her clients as a tool to help them better plan travel.
She built the app herself using generative AI models Claude and Manus.
Day estimated that a custom app like Gatherwell would have cost her $50,000 to $100,000 if she employed a traditional engineering team to create it.
It wasn't without costs; she said she spent more than 200 hours on its creation and about $1,200 in AI subscriptions. She enjoyed the process.
"In the span of a few months, the technology evolved to a place where I could build it, and that was super exciting," she said.
The technology certainly isn't perfect. While Day estimated AI did about 80% of the work in creating her app, she stressed that it still needed human eyes and problem-solving to create the end product. It took a lot of patience to refine the app; sometimes, things didn't work the way she wanted, and it took 10 to 20 times until she reached the desired result.
"I love the AI, but the human factor is still very much needed," she said.
While Day believes humans will always be integral to the travel industry, technology can help solve some problems.
"Let's be an industry that is disrupting," she said. "I think that we're in an awesome time in our history to be able to do that."