Tripals wants to fix group travel — and it just threw a party to prove it

Every group trip starts the same way. Someone creates a WhatsApp group. Messages pile up. Decisions don’t get made. Bookings end up scattered across five different tabs. By the time you finally land somewhere, the coordination has already taken more energy than it should.

Helen Si and Leo — co-founders of Tripals — lived this pattern on repeat. Frequent travellers, they kept running into the same friction on every group trip: the tools exist, but they don’t talk to each other, and none of them was built for the actual experience of planning something together. Helen even turned that frustration into the first post on Tripals’ travel blog: “When Group Travel Gets Awkward” — a light-hearted account of a real trip that became the seed of the whole idea.

So rather than accepting the chaos as part of the process, they started building a different way. That conversation eventually became Tripals — and on April 3rd in Paris, they launched it to over 100 people.

What the app actually does

Tripals is an all-in-one mobile app for group travel, built around three core functions. The first is organising: creating a shared trip, building a clean group itinerary, and keeping everyone aligned on dates, activities, maps, and essential travel details — all in one place.

The second is collaboration: every traveller in the group can add their own suggestions, and the app includes built-in polls so the group can vote on activities and make decisions together without resorting to another message thread. The third is storing: flights, accommodation, tickets, and bookings for the entire group are saved in one secure place, auto-organised and accessible to every traveller at any time.

The app is already live and available to download. Alongside it, the team has published a free Notion-based Group Travel Template — a practical tool for travellers who want better organisation before fully committing to the app.

Beyond the planning layer, Tripals is building towards something bigger: a global community of travellers, and a marketplace connecting those travellers with local experience curators — guides and hosts who want to offer something more authentic than what mainstream platforms surface. For local experience providers currently relying on fragmented or offline distribution, Tripals offers a channel to a global audience actively seeking such depth.

The four-person founding team covers the full range of what they’re building. Helen (CEO) and Leo (CMO) bring the vision and community lens — shaped by years of group travel and a persistent frustration with how disjointed it remained. Vanessa (CPO) and Corentin (CTO) joined to build it, testing early concepts and shipping the first version of the product together.

The launch event: a trip, compressed into one evening

The April 3rd launch party in Paris wasn’t just a product announcement. It was a deliberate attempt to recreate the feeling of travelling together — and to let that experience speak louder than any demo could.

Guests arrived to find a Tripals Passport waiting for them: a set of challenges to complete throughout the evening, serving as an entry into a final lottery. Each activity was designed around the philosophy behind the product. At one station, guests pinned their favourite and dream destinations on a world map — revealing unexpected overlaps and shared aspirations among strangers. At another, they wrote a personal travel pledge: a small commitment to finally pursue that trip they’d been postponing.

The final challenge brought the room alive. Guests were encouraged to approach people they didn’t know — of different nationalities, with unfamiliar faces, or with contrasting travel styles — and capture a moment together. What began as a task quickly turned into spontaneous conversations, laughter, and new connections forming in real time.

The highlight of the evening was a live demo by Helen and Vanessa, who invited two volunteers from the crowd to plan their next trip on the spot using the app. Beyond showing what the product could do, it made something tangible: that Tripals can turn a vague travel aspiration into an actual plan, in minutes, together.

Over 100 guests came — travellers, entrepreneurs, creators, and explorers. The app was present throughout the evening but never at the centre. What emerged instead was the thing Tripals is actually trying to enable: people meeting, exchanging stories, and imagining future journeys together.

What comes next

Tripals is currently live and building its early community in Paris, with plans to expand to other cities. The team is continuing to develop the local experiences layer and publishing a growing library of destination guides through the “Travel with Us” blog — from Christmas markets in Dresden and Paris to surfing in Bali and hiking in Tenerife — written directly by the founders and reflecting the spirit of what they’re building.

For Helen, the goal was always bigger than a planning tool: “We wanted to create something that helps people travel more intentionally — not just more efficiently. Travel is one of the few things in life where the people you share it with matter as much as the place itself.”