A Head Start on Every New Trip — Plus Suggested Tripmates and Clearer Expenses

Getting a group trip off the ground is the slow part — turning "we should go somewhere" into actual plans people can react to. June was mostly about that first push: a faster way to get ideas onto a new trip, the people you usually travel with one tap away, and (finally) expenses everyone can see.

🧭 A head start on a new trip

When you unlock a trip, Bonder now opens with an "Explore ideas" section: a few real travel blogs for your destination, each with a photo and a one-line description. Read one — you're sending the writer a real visit — then tap to pull its day-by-day plan straight into your trip as proposed items.

Even when you already know roughly what you want, it's the fastest way to get the first few things on the board so the group has something to react to. And if you're the one who got handed the "so… who's planning this?" baton, it's a much friendlier starting point.

A couple of things behind it got better too:

• The suggestions now match how long your trip is — a 3-day trip and a 10-day trip to the same place no longer get the same reading list.
• Importing a plan from a long, heavy travel page used to time out and give you nothing. Those pages now come in reliably, and when an import does fail, you get the real reason instead of a generic shrug.

👥 Suggested tripmates when you start a trip

The same group keeps showing up on your trips, and you keep retyping their emails. Not anymore. When you add members to a new trip, Bonder now shows the people you've traveled with before — ranked by who you travel with most, then most recently. Tap a name and they're on the invite list.

They still get the normal invitation email and have to accept — this just saves you the typing.

💸 Expenses everyone can actually see

This one was overdue. If you split an expense with someone, they couldn't actually see it — they got their split row but never the expense itself, so their portion just… didn't show up for them. Now anyone you split an expense with sees it in the trip's finances, and they can edit or delete it too, the same way the rest of shared expenses already work. It even applies to expenses you split before this shipped.

📲 Smoother on your phone

A few things that only ever felt broken on a phone got fixed:

• Reorder your day with a long-press. In the calendar view, dragging itinerary items to reorder them used to be desktop-only. On mobile, you can now long-press an item in the day's list to pick it up and drop it where you want — the new order saves instantly. Quick taps still open the item; a normal swipe still scrolls.
• One finger on the map. The full-screen mobile map needed two fingers to pan and zoom, which felt broken. One-finger drags now just work.
• Notes you can actually read. Long notes and descriptions on an item used to get clipped to a few lines inside a tiny scroll box. They now grow to fit, so the whole thing is visible and the page scrolls as one.

✨ More control over what opens on launch

When you're mid-trip, Bonder jumping straight to today's plan is great. When you're near the end of a trip and trying to plan the next one, it's a small daily annoyance. There's now a toggle in Profile → Preferences to turn that off, and a one-tap "Jump to today's plan" banner is always there on your dashboard either way.

🐛 Fixes and polish

A few small annoyances, now gone:

• Long comments in the trip feed no longer silently fail to post — write as much as you want.
• Posting a link in the feed no longer leaves a broken, empty image box next to it. The link itself still works, of course.
• Exported trip PDFs no longer turn paragraph breaks and everyday punctuation (like the spaces in "3:00 PM") into stray question marks, and names with accents now stay readable.
• Trip owners can freely change anyone's role again — an old subscription check was wrongly blocking it.
• Map pins now match the day shown on each item's card, so an evening plan no longer shows up a day off on the map.

That's June. Go plan something → Try Bonder free