VibePath: a trip planner for people who hate planning trips

Planning a weekend trip from a Tier 2 city in India means juggling Google Maps, MakeMyTrip, blog posts, and WhatsApp groups at the same time. I noticed this every time I tried to plan a trip out of Kanpur, and I kept noticing it was the same five tabs every time.

So I built VibePath. You give it your budget, where you're starting from, and what kind of trip you want, and it gives you three fully costed itineraries across 62 destinations.

Budget as a slider, not a filter

The first version treated budget as a filter — pick a range, get results within it. That felt wrong the moment I used it myself. A budget isn't a hard cutoff, it's a dial you're willing to move if the itinerary on the other side of it is good enough. So budget became a slider instead, and the itineraries update against it directly.

Why a second LLM checks the first one

The riskiest part of a tool like this is confidently wrong information — a suggested homestay that's closed, a travel time that's off by an hour. A second LLM fact-checks the first one's suggestions before a user ever sees them. It's slower than shipping the first model's output directly, but a trip planner that's fast and wrong is worse than one that's a little slower and right.

What I didn't expect

The most useful signal since launch hasn't been which itineraries get picked — it's been watching where people move the budget slider before they've read a single itinerary. People decide their ceiling before they see any options, which says something about how much of trip planning is actually about permission to spend, not discovery.