Globe Skimmer: The New Travel Planning App That Doesn’t Suck

Firstly, this blog post isn’t AI generated, this story wouldn’t be meaningful if it wasn’t in my tone of voice. So lets get that out of the way before you start to dive in what ‘Globe Skimmer‘ actually is.

It was this past summer of 2026, May/June — and Katie and I had recently heard that our best friend was getting married in another country – Portugal. I had never been outside of the country before, more or less leaving my own house as someone who is remote day-to-day. Yes, I touch grass occasionally, but the thought of an overseas trip to a place I’d never been before felt alarming at first.

So while I’ve set the tone of the risen emotions of traveling abroad – ultimately, this led to the big idea that we had. “Lets just build our own trip planner app – and share it with our friends”. Brilliantly, we had the idea that everyone gets the ‘Travel Bug’ – so why don’t we call it ‘Globe Skimmer’ – which is a type of dragon fly that crosses oceans at a pace of sometimes 11,000 miles at once!

At first, during our research, we noticed that globeskimmer.com domain was on the market for $16k (no thank you) – so instead we went the route of ‘globeskimmer.app‘. That day – we bought the domain on Cloudflare (Free-tier), and truly started diving in on what this could be in the long run.

Flights, hotels, street names I’ve never heard of, Map of an area that I have no idea about, and no idea how to keep my brain on track with all of it. Usually Europe trips at first thought aren’t daunting, but in that moment, it was – at least for me.

Once we had the domain, we started to envision what type of tech stack this build would need. We genuinely wanted this to work for us during usage, but also wanted the capability of sharing it with friends and family to enjoy.

‘Itchy’: Your AI Travel Bug Companion

So we had the idea, we had the domain, and technically speaking, we had started running with this idea of a itinerary tracker linked with Maps so you could easily see how far your hotels/flights are to your planned destinations (in this case, the wedding location and all of the events near that location). In this instance – I started to research free capacity APIs (I thought of hotels.com at first which was 10 calls per day – no thank you). Instead, Globe Skimmer uses the booking.com free API, which allows up to 530 calls per month. While you can only book outside of the app, this just gave me the capability to easily look at the hotels around the wedding, and make a decision to book.

At first this was just a very simple idea of track your stuff, one place for everything as I’m on the go for the trip abroad. Hotels, flights, documents, confirmation numbers, and the list goes on…

And then it hit us – “Why don’t we add a tool to help us as were planning our trip?” Of course anyone can jump into ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude for free and start typing away at what they want, and they get a spew of results.

In our mind – Itchy would be a tailored guide specifically for your trip. Grounded in YOUR data, and only making recommendations that make sense based on what you are doing/going/etc. We had the idea of calling this thing ‘Itchy‘ – cause it bridged the gap of ‘you got the travel-bug – use it’.

Itchy concepting is still in motion, and we’re still releasing updates that helps users with planning, and tracking their trip in the app. While we are upfronting the cost on this one via the Claude API, this is the sole reason why the app is behind a paywall. Not only is security if APIs important to us – the security of our users data is priority when it comes to app-use.

Itchy goes even further in terms of delegating ‘commands’. Whether you want to automatically add an expense, flight/hotel details, or even a reservation for dinner to your itinerary – just ask Itchy, and it will take care of it for you in the Globe Skimmer app. Itchy can also ensure to give you recommendations based on your trip as well.

The Globe Skimmer Roadmap

Currently we’ve been shipping new updates across the app to increase its value. The latest update is travelers are able to share a trip via a link/invite where they can follow the full itinerary without paying for the app.

Guests are able to share suggestions for their fellow trip goers. So, an example; if you know someone traveling to a place you’ve been before, this allows you to add suggestions in real time for that traveler. Think of it as a ‘trip collaborator’ in a sense of living viciously through someone’s journey you’ve been through before.

As we hear feedback from users, we’ll continue to make upgrades on UX, features and more!

Don’t be afraid – reach out with what you think would be beneficial for the app!