An Even Easier Way to Create Maps & Itineraries

This entry is part 4 of 11 in the series Travel Tools & Tips for Planning, Scheduling, Recording & Commemorating Your Trips

Update 3/17: They come and they go. I wrote the below post last year and used the Pebbler app several times. I thought it was decent, and the best that I’d come across. Unfortunately, I logged in today and saw this:

So, sadly, Pebblar will no longer be available after April. Happily, I found another app, and I wrote a new post about it. The desktop version is accessible on the web at https://travaa.com and the app is available in the app store as Travaa.

Previous post: The caveat, of course, is that it costs money. But it could be worth it because of the time it saves you. I wrote the previous post about Scout Explorer two months ago. Today, as I was reviewing it again, I thought I should check to see if anything new has arrived. And, naturally, something new showed up! It’s called Pebblar. So, in this post, I will show you an even easier way to create maps and itineraries using Pebblar. And I’ll give you the lowdown on keeping down the costs of using it.

When you sign up to use Pebblar, there is nothing that says it costs anything to use. I find this disappointing. You could go to a lot of effort to put everything in there. And then find out you have to pay. But there’s a way around this. If your plans are fairly firm, you can add everything into Pebblar. You can make changes during the 30-day free trial. And then after your 30-day free trial ends, if you don’t want to pay, the itinerary becomes read-only. But you can still use it and follow along. You just can’t make any updates to it.

Pebblar’s Cost

Let’s get the prices out of the way first. You can choose to pay per itinerary for two of the options. Both plans allow you unlimited editing for you and your tripmates. If you’re going to three cities or fewer, it’s $3 per itinerary. And, if you’re going to more than three cities, it’s $10 per itinerary. If you want unlimited itineraries and cities, you can pay $9.95 per month, per person and that gives you and your tripmates full editing privileges and unlimited itineraries. It’s not especially clear on the website, but they do say that tripmates do not have to pay the monthly fee to edit trips they’re on.

Steps to Create an Itinerary Using Pebblar

Let’s walk through the process of creating an itinerary.

When you create an account and log in, your first step is to Add New (add a trip). You will need to enter a name for your trip. When I put my Italy and Croatia trip into Pebblar, it wasn’t clear to me the distinction between a trip and a destination city until I started building the itinerary. Since we’re going to approximately 20 cities on that trip, I wasn’t sure whether to put the end city or the start city. But if you make a mistake, it’s pretty easy to fix.

Next, you’ll enter one or more destination cities. Here’s an example using our trip to Hawaii.

Next, I added Oahu but then I realized I needed to add the city of departure so I could add my flight information. I wanted to do this because then I don’t have to consult different apps while traveling. So, I kept Oahu in there and added Sacramento International Airport as another city. This, of course, put it at the bottom of the list. To fix that I grabbed the city with my mouse and moved it above Oahu. This was a little tricky and took a couple of tries. But once I got it moved, I could add the flight info to the item.

One thing about Pebblar is that it’s so feature-rich, there’s almost too much to look at. So, let’s take a closer look. In the left panel, below the city where I entered the airport, you can see an airplane icon. That shows up because the destination I added is an airport. Next to that is the Add Your Own button, which I find unnecessary and confusing. Its purpose is to let you add your own type of transportation. But on the right-hand side, there’s a widget that lets you add a note to that item. I’ve circled it with highlighting in the picture below.

If you look carefully, there are two of those widgets on this panel for the destination city. The widget basically tells you you can add a note. Its placement tells you what you’re adding a note to. So, if you click the note widget next to the destination city, you’re adding a note to the date or date range. And if you add a note next to the item below the destination city, you’re adding the note to that place.

Here’s what it looks like after I’ve added the note to the place. In this case, I’ve added the flight confirmation number and departure time.

One minor issue I noticed is that when you click the up arrow, it closes the note, and you can’t tell there is a note on that item once it’s closed. I think users would prefer some indication (e.g., additional color or identifier) that shows there is a note on the place. Here’s what it looks like after adding a note and closing it.

As you’re adding destinations and activities on the left panel, the right panel begins to show a summary of the trip. You can close the guidance window, which will give you more visibility to the summary. If you close it, it basically minimizes so you can reopen it if necessary.

In the right panel, you can add times to places. You just click the clock widget next to the place.

As the guidance window showed, you click on the icon panel that has the utensils, bed, and what looks like buildings but what is meant to be a transportation icon. When you do that, an additional window opens that lets you search for the place. Here I’ve added Holiday Inn Express Waikiki.

You have to click on each day you will be at this place. Here’s another minor annoyance I experienced with this. You can see in the date’s widget, it doesn’t show all the dates. You have to scroll horizontally to be able to click on the additional dates. Horizontal scrolling is particularly annoying because the scroll bar is tiny. So, getting the site to recognize that your mouse is on it is difficult. I think a calendar widget that opens and allows you to set a beginning date and end date (and thus, selecting all dates in between) would have been more user-friendly. Once you’ve added dates, a calendar widget is what is displayed anyway.

Once you’ve added an item, you can add another item by searching for it in the same window. Since this is a scuba diving vacation with multiple dives on multiple days with different start times, I added them as separate places.

Pebblar’s Value

To summarize, the way Pebblar works: it’s broad to narrow, meaning you enter a city and then you add accommodations, transportation, activities, etc., to that city. So, this takes the place of having to figure out your dates ahead of time. You just add all the cities you want to go to. Add the activities you want to do in those cities. And that can help dictate how long you need to be in each place. Then you can start assigning dates and booking hotels.

I found entering the information to be pretty straightforward. But it’s still a manual process. It does take some of the headaches out of going to multiple tools to do things.

Pebblar’s Map Functionality

When I was evaluating the map functionality, I had to go to Pebblar’s FAQ section because I couldn’t figure out a way to view directions. I looked at “How do I map on my desktop.” That showed a feature that doesn’t appear to exist. Here’s the screenshot from the FAQ.

But here’s the screenshot on the Desktop. It’s missing the Preview.

Out of frustration, I downloaded their app. And after some trial and error, I found the ability to open the map using any of the three map apps they’ve integrated with. And this makes sense because you’d be navigating with your phone, not your desktop.

Here are the steps, looking at the first screenshot below:

• After you’ve chosen your trip, you will end up on the Trip Plan view
• Click on Itinerary (pink button in the upper part of the map)
• In the lower section, choose a date and scroll to one of the places you want to find directions to
• Click on the Directions button in that item (grey button below the address)

When you click on the Directions button, a window displays over the top of the location you were looking at and prompts you to choose a map app to open the map in. Here, I picked Google Maps. Normally, you’d have the directions then from your location. But because we hadn’t left yet when I did this, I had to key in the starting point (third screenshot).

For me, the time savings is worth the $10 per itinerary because I’d probably use it mainly for our mega trips. I hope you find this tool to be an even easier way to create maps and itineraries like I did.

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