Why I built Crowdtrip
Crowdtrip exists to make travel feel more collaborative, less chaotic, and better informed by the people around you.
I love to travel. In fact, those who know me would probably say I live to travel.
But as I've got older, my travel has changed. Unplanned solo trips without a care in the world are very different to travelling with friends and family, where you're often the one responsible for everything going smoothly.
Sometimes travel can be high stakes. Precision is needed to plan a honeymoon across six locations. Now imagine trying to organise a big family trip or milestone trip for a group of people, all with different budgets, preferences, and expectations. Research becomes relentless. You plough through dozens of reviews, make constant trade-offs on pricing and location, and everything starts to blur into a huge mental load.
By the time the trip is booked, you’ve often forgotten half of what you discovered along the way — let alone what inspired everyone else.
On a recent trip to Rio — my fourth visit — I thought I knew everything. But my 21-year-old son dragged me to a Japanese restaurant I'd never heard of and a samba night at Pedra do Sal I would never have found on my own. He reminded me of something simple: when everyone contributes, you end up with a better trip than any one of us could have planned alone.
The best trips aren't planned by one person. They're built from what everyone brings.
Shared planning, better trips
On one of my many solo trips, I found myself in the cultural city of Yogyakarta in Indonesia. While visiting various sites, one stop stood out: the Taman Sari Water Castle. I remember it vividly as a local guide described the history of the palace — the Sultan, and the way he would summon his concubines from his upper dwelling.
It was his knowledge and enthusiasm that brought the place to life for me, and it stayed with me long after the palace itself had faded from memory.
I've carried that ever since. The best parts of a trip are rarely the ones you'd have found on your own. They come from other people — someone close to you, a guide, a local, a passing recommendation that shifts how you see a place.
The trouble is, all of that is fragile. The ideas, the recommendations, the things that genuinely excite people — they get scattered across messages and tabs, and somewhere between the first “we should go somewhere” and the trip actually being booked, most of it quietly disappears. Usually one person ends up trying to hold it all together.
That's what I built Crowdtrip for. To give everything everyone brings a place to live, so it isn't lost — and to make it easier for a group to shape all of it into a real trip together, without one person carrying the whole load.
Every journey is different. Sometimes meticulous planning is essential. Other times the best moments come when a trip is allowed to unfold on its own. Travel has its rhythms, ebbs and flows — and good planning should support that, not fight it.
So I wanted to build something that helped people bring their ideas together, turn them into something real, and still leave room for surprise.
Something that helps people plan together without losing the human side of it.
I hope you join us on this journey.
Greg Brown
Founder, Crowdtrip