How I created Plan It Let’s Go

After being inspired to travel having gone on a fantastic trip to the Grand Canyon in 2022 on a Tauck Tour (if you don’t know Tauck Tours, I highly recommend them!), I would not have considered myself a seasoned traveler.  I had the obligatory semester abroad in London and traveled in Europe after (which was impactful for me and I had an amazing time with my dear friend Remy from college).  But I would say my passion for traveling, for the transformational experience of travel, lay dormant for a really long time.  My passion for travel though started brewing at the beginning of 2020.

As the world was shutting down due to the global pandemic, I turned to art.

I started a large mural painting (96 in x 48 in) done in a style I had only experimented with on a small scale and I wasn’t sure what subject I would choose.  I think because of the global impact of the pandemic I thought of a map, and the style was interconnected concentric circles that spoke to me of the interconnectedness of all countries.

I do feel the interconnectedness of all countries and the painting was an unconscious sense of that, especially during the pandemic.  You can check out my art here as well.

So in June 2022 about to go on the Tauck Tour, something funny happened.

I had what was a very innocuous conversation with one of the Dads on my daughter’s soccer team.  He mentioned he was going to Orange County, California for a business trip and knew I had lived in Los Angeles for a long time and wondered if I could give him some quick tips on how best to see LA for just a day.  I said “Sure!  Of course, my pleasure, I can totally put together a quick itinerary on the best way to see LA for a day.”  Then with the pressure of my own trip coming, I completely forgot to put the itinerary together (and felt very bad about that) but still thought about it a lot. If I had one day in LA and I was coming up from Orange County, what is the best way to see LA, how would I go, what are some cool super secret places that one else knows about?  

Then on the Tauck Tour, the main tour director was an amazing person named Jenee’.  She was just a super dynamo, giving facts along the way, coordinating with the hotels, the National Parks and the restaurants all while keeping her balance on the tour bus.  One day Jenee was running down from the bus to grab tickets to enter Bryce Canyon National Park, and I suddenly had the epiphany “what if someone like Jenee created a day-by-day itinerary to see the Grand Canyon (there are many, many ways to see the Grand Canyon), where whether you are backpacking and camping to the Canyon floor, or rafting down, or want to see some cool out of the way Slot Canyons on Navajo Land, anyone could follow the itinerary and do it”.

The last thing I was thinking about was starting a business

So I put some notes in my phone, and then when we got to Las Vegas, at the brunch in the Four Seasons (see, Tauck Tours are nice!) I mentioned the idea to my wife and two daughters and they liked it.

Fortunately (or unfortunately for them), my wife and daughters caught COVID when we were in Las Vegas and when we went to Los Angeles while they were in bed for several days I just sat by the pool in Marina Del Ray Marriot and sketched out the idea for what became Plan It Let’s Go.  

Travel is a massive, complex space with hundreds if not thousands of variables so the scale of the problem was quickly apparent.  But I thought what if these itineraries could help reduce the complexity of travel planning, and help reduce the time it takes to plan a vacation (if you’re not going on a high-end Tauck Tour).  

I’ll be posting more posts about my background, how I built Plan It Let’s Go and how Plan It Let’s Go has completely ignited my passion for travel, for the transformational experience of travel.

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Written by: Phil