Why I built Smooth-Traveling.com

Why I built Smooth-Traveling.com

I didn't set out to build a travel app. I set out to fix a spreadsheet.

For years, every trip I planned lived across a mess of tools that were never quite made for each other. A spreadsheet for the budget. A Google Doc for the day-by-day plan. A dozen browser tabs for flights, trains, and buses that never talked to one another. A group chat where someone would ask "wait, who's paying for the Airbnb?" three days into the trip, and nobody had a clean answer. By the time I actually left for the airport, I'd usually spent more hours planning than I wanted to admit — and somehow the plan still fell apart the moment something changed.

And something always changed. A train got cancelled. A friend joined late and needed to be looped in on decisions that had already been made without them. The exchange rate meant nobody actually knew what "splitting things evenly" meant anymore once three currencies were involved. Every trip, the same friction, just wearing a different costume.

I remember one trip specifically where the actual travel — the trains, the cities, the people — was wonderful, and the logistics around it were genuinely stressful enough to take the shine off parts of it. That's the moment the idea actually stuck: the tools we use to plan trips were built like static documents, when a real trip is a living thing. It changes shape as it happens. The plan on day one is never quite the plan by day four, and none of the tools I was using were built to move with it.

So I started building the thing I actually wanted to use.

What I was actually trying to solve

I wasn't trying to build "another travel app." I was trying to solve a specific, recurring problem: the tools for planning a trip and the tools for living through a trip were always separate, and that gap is where every headache came from.

Smooth Traveling started as an attempt to close that gap. Day-by-day itinerary building that actually reflects how a trip really unfolds, not just a static list. Multi-modal routing that treats a flight, a train, and a rental car as parts of the same journey instead of three separate bookings you have to mentally stitch together. Real-time collaboration, so a group trip is actually planned as a group, not by one person forwarding updates to everyone else. Multi-currency budget tracking that doesn't require a calculator and a prayer. And eventually, cost splitting — because I was tired of trips ending with someone quietly eating a cost nobody ever paid them back for.

None of these were features I dreamed up in the abstract. Every one of them came from a specific trip where I hit the same wall and thought, "this shouldn't be this hard."

Building it alone

I've built this as a solo founder — no co-founder, no team, just me handling the product and the business side at the same time. That's been the hardest and most honest part of the process. There's no one else to blame when something doesn't work, and no one else to hand off the parts I'm less confident in. Every feature in the app exists because I personally hit the problem it solves, sat with it long enough to be annoyed by it, and then built the fix myself.

That's also, I think, what makes Smooth Traveling different from tools built by teams who researched travel pain points secondhand. I'm not guessing at what frustrates travelers. I've been the traveler standing at a train platform recalculating a shared budget in my head while everyone else waited for me to figure out who owed what.

Where this is headed

Smooth Traveling is still growing, and it's still shaped by the same instinct that started it: if something about planning or living through a trip feels harder than it should, that's the next thing worth fixing. I'd rather build slowly and solve real friction than ship features nobody asked for.

If you've ever ended a great trip feeling a little worn down by the logistics around it rather than the trip itself, that's exactly who I built this for. That was me, more times than I can count. I'm hoping it doesn't have to be you.

I hope you enjoy the app as much as i do.

Herbert Backhausen, Owner and Founder