The Man Who Never Packs a Spreadsheet

By a Smooth Traveling reader, on the road9 min read

Day 1 — Barcelona, 6:14 AM

I've never been a spreadsheet person. Forty years of running businesses taught me plenty, but color-coded travel logs were never my language — and yet here I am, sixty-six years old, standing on a hotel balcony in Barcelona with an itinerary that reads like it was assembled by a team of three people who've never met each other, and somehow it all just works.

That's the first thing I noticed about Smooth-Traveling.com: it doesn't ask you to think like a project manager. It asks you to think like a traveler. I typed in "Valencia, then somewhere on the coast, then home through Paris" and within minutes had a day-by-day itinerary builder laid out in front of me — not a wall of options, just my trip, organized the way I'd organize it if I had the patience (I don't).

"It doesn't ask you to think like a project manager. It asks you to think like a traveler."

Day 2 — The Multi-Modal Puzzle

Here's where most travel apps fall apart for someone like me: I don't fly everywhere. Some legs are trains, some are ferries, some are just a rental car and a good playlist. I've spent entire afternoons in the past trying to stitch together a route across three different booking sites, only to realize the ferry departs forty minutes before the train arrives.

Smooth Traveling chains it all — planes, trains, buses, ferries, drives — into a single route. I watched it lay out a morning train from Barcelona to Valencia, a rented car for the coastal stretch toward Alicante, and a ferry connection I hadn't even considered, complete with operator names and border-crossing notes I'd never have found on my own. It's not a flight-and-hotel app pretending to understand road trips. It actually understands them.

I stood on that platform — the one with the ironwork ceiling and the light coming through in long gold shafts — and realized I wasn't checking three tabs anymore. I was just there.

Day 3 — Valencia, Planning With Ghosts (or Friends)

My favorite part of this trip wasn't a place. It was a feature.

I'm traveling with my wife's sister and her husband this time, and normally that means a group chat that turns into chaos by day two. This time, we all built the itinerary together, live, inside the app. And when nobody could agree on a restaurant, the AI-assisted suggestions stepped in — grounded in real, verified places, not some hallucinated "charming local bistro" that turns out not to exist. Every suggestion checked out. That matters more than people realize until the first time an app sends you to a restaurant that closed in 2019.

"Every suggestion checked out — grounded in real, verified places, never a hallucinated bistro that closed years ago."

Day 4 — The Money Problem, Solved

I've been keeping a version of a travel budget in my head for decades, and it's always wrong by the time I land somewhere new. Euros become pounds, pounds become dollars, and somewhere in there I lose track of what a "reasonable" dinner actually costs.

Smooth Traveling tracks it all in real time — USD, EUR, GBP, whatever the trip demands — with live exchange rates, so the number I see on my phone actually matches the number leaving my account. For a trip spanning three currencies in nine days, that alone was worth the price of admission (which, worth noting, was nothing — my first three trips were free, no card required).

Day 5 — Somewhere Near the Sea, Looking Back

Last night I scrolled back through the trip — not out of boredom, but because the app makes it easy to relive rather than just archive. Cover photos turned each leg of the journey into something closer to a visual journal than a folder of confirmation emails. Planning, Booked, Visited — the whole thing organized by status, so next year when I start plotting the Valencia sequel, I'm not digging through old texts to remember which hotel had the good breakfast.

"Cover photos turned each leg of the journey into something closer to a visual journal than a folder of confirmation emails."

Day 6 — What I'd Tell Anyone My Age Considering This

I didn't build this trip with spreadsheets, sticky notes, or seventeen browser tabs. I built it in minutes, with people I love, with a budget I could actually see, and with a route that respected the fact that not every good trip starts with a boarding pass.

Smooth Traveling didn't make the trip — Valencia did that, and the light through that old train shed did the rest. But it got out of my way, which, at this point in my traveling life, might be the highest compliment I can give a piece of software.

Next stop: somewhere with mountains. I've already started the itinerary.

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