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. It started with Vienna: two long layovers between flights, one on the way to London and one on the way back, each planned to the hour — and the city landed so well that I turned the improvised planning-and-remembering rig behind that trip into something I could use again. 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, checked for the day and the hour you will be standing in front of it. Sunset is calculated, not guessed. Travel times know whether you are walking or driving. When something cannot be checked, the plan says so rather than guessing. And because plans go stale, a saved itinerary can be refreshed against live data — so the double-checking I used to do by hand now takes one tap.
You do not need an account for any of this. What Rustichello learns about your taste sits in the browser you plan in, and when you want it on your phone as well as your laptop, you mint a short carry code and type it in on the other device. There is nothing to sign up for and no email to hand over. The code carries taste only: never your name, your email, your trips or your photographs. Wipe a device and it starts fresh, and the device that minted the code takes the carried copy down with it.
When it's time for a memoir, you pick how your photographs are handled — both paths are first-class:
The writer looks at the photos. Each photograph is read as it was taken, and nothing is used for training. Every caption then describes what you actually shot, and a photograph that does not belong to the trip is flagged to you rather than guessed at.
Maximum privacy. Your photographs come to Rustichello only to read their time and place and assemble the memoir. They are never shown to the writer. Mark each one with its stop number, or add a short note ("sunset from the breakwall"), and the captions use your words instead.
The planned-trip memoir builder offers both paths. The direct old-photo route currently has the writer look at your photographs, and says so before you upload.
Both paths are first-class. Photographs are never used for training. Copies uploaded through this memoir builder are deleted after a completed build.
Simple and in the open: one free itinerary, ever. Signing in does not add another. Your first itinerary is free. After that, the Traveller's Shelf is $7.50 a month for three fresh itineraries a month, with every subscriber itinerary kept and the keep-fresh tools. It covers planning only. A memoir is still bought one at a time, and is never part of the subscription. A memoir you buy stays yours to edit: reorder it, recaption it, add photos whenever you like; it's never one-and-done. Your own words are always free and never rationed; the writing I do for you afterwards is included up to a generous number. It stays the trip you bought, too: the destination, dates and stops of a planned memoir can't be edited into somewhere else, and a memoir built from photographs alone keeps most of its original set. That's the whole model. Because you're the client, you're never the product.
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
hello@rustichello.co — it lands directly with me, not a ticket queue.
The small print, in plain language: how your data is handled · terms.