I love travelling — and for years I planned trips the hard way. Usually on the morning of the trip itself: hours deep in reviews, place write-ups, social media, friends' recommendations and official sites, trying to weave the most efficient, feature-packed, must-see day — then coordinating all of it against opening days, the weather forecast, and the logistics of actually getting from one place to the next. Plan too early and there's a catch: everything has to be re-checked closer to the day in case an opening time changed or the weather turned. So I'd end up doing the work twice.
Then, on the trip itself, the plan would freeze. Changing anything mid-day meant planning on holiday — the one place you don't want to be planning. And the photos I took to capture it all? They stayed in my phone's album and never saw the light of day again.
So I built this — out of necessity, to save myself those hours, and to finally have the story of a trip worth keeping and sharing. The first real test was New York, a city I'd already visited many times. Even so: the planning, the sequencing, the insider knowledge threaded through the day, and a memoir at the end that caught the whole of it — it was honestly the best trip I've ever taken there. That was the moment I decided to build it properly, so other people could have it too.
The more you use it, the more it becomes yours: itineraries tuned to how you actually like to travel, memoirs written closer and closer to your own voice.
In a Genoese prison at the end of the thirteenth century, a romance writer named Rustichello da Pisa shared a cell with a Venetian merchant who wouldn't stop talking about his travels. Rustichello wrote it all down. The merchant was Marco Polo — and without the world's most famous ghostwriter, the greatest journey of the age would have evaporated the way almost every journey does. This is your Rustichello. Your chance to be Marco Polo.
A travel plan is only as good as its worst fact, so the app runs on one rule: the writing is generated, the facts are not. Every café, restaurant and bar on an itinerary is a real, currently-operating place verified against live data when your plan is built — address, opening hours for your exact day and time, prices. Sunset times are computed astronomy. Travel times know whether you're walking or driving. When something can't be verified, the plan says so honestly instead of guessing. And because plans go stale, a saved itinerary can be refreshed — sun, weather and timings re-checked against live data — so the double-checking I used to do by hand happens with one tap.
When it's time for a memoir, you pick how your photographs are handled — both paths are first-class:
Richest captions. Let the writer glance at each photo — a downscaled copy, processed and never kept or trained on — so every caption describes what you actually shot, and a photo that doesn't belong to the trip gets flagged to you rather than guessed at.
Maximum privacy. Your photographs never leave the app. Tag each photo with its stop number, or add a short note ("sunset from the breakwall") — and the memoir is worded from your words. Building a memoir from an old trip's photos works the same way: add a location or a line per photo and the writer takes it from there.
Either way, the only text that ever reaches the writing model is what you chose to put in the trip.
Simple and in the open: planning is free, and you pay only for what you keep — the finished memoir, and (if you want it) a bigger, always-fresh shelf of saved itineraries. That's the whole model. When you're the customer, nobody else needs to be.
One last thing worth knowing about who you're dealing with: I'm the developer, the user, the customer support and the founder. If something's wrong, the person reading your email is the person who can fix it — same day, usually.
Regards,
Fitz
The small print, in plain language: how your data is handled · terms. Questions to hello@rustichello.co.