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Resumen del episodio
Ed and Sora announce a free trip planner app they built to help DIY travelers organize Jeju itineraries. The app features 50+ activities, from popular Instagram spots to slow traveler experiences, with KakaoMap links for each destination. Ed confesses the real reason he built it: his entire family is going to Jeju for Christmas and he needed a way to get everyone on the same page. Sora tries to get Ed to build one for New York too. He declines.
Puntos clave
- What the Trip Planner does:
- 50+ activities to browse and add to a wishlist
- Organize activities across 1-5 day itineraries with time slots
- Warns you if activities are in opposite regions (east vs. west) to avoid wasting time driving around Hallasan
- Flags seasonal activities (cherry blossoms in April, tangerine picking Nov-Jan) if they don’t match your travel month
- Sends your completed itinerary to your email with KakaoMap links and additional info for each activity
- Helps visualize where activities are clustered so you can decide where to book hotels
- What the Trip Planner does NOT do:
- Not a booking service
- Not based on crowd-sourced reviews; activities are curated based on Ed and Sora’s personal experience
- Does not include every possible option in a category (e.g., not every green tea farm in Jeju, just the ones they’ve been to)
- Who it’s for:
- DIY travelers who need to research and plan independently
- Tour participants who want to compare what tour companies offer against what they actually want to do
- Access: vamosajeju.com/trip
Próximos pasos
- Try the Trip Planner at vamosajeju.com/trip
- Follow @vamosajeju on Instagram and TikTok
- Subscribe to our YouTube channel @vamosajeju
Transcripción del episodio
Announcing the Trip Planner
Sora (00:18) Hello, welcome to our podcast, Vamos a Jeju.
Sora (00:21) Yeah, so actually we have very good news to share with everyone. We’ve built a free trip planner app where you can go to build your own DIY Jeju itinerary.
Ed (00:34) Yeah, so we’ve got more than 50 activities in this app that you can pick and choose and organize into like one to five day travels. Some of these are very popular activities that you will always find on recommended lists in Jeju. Some of them are more for slow traveler experiences that aren’t really the Instagram locations that you must go. It’s not a top 10 thing. It is instead activities that are more meaningful that bring you more connection to the island. Our app will figure out how much time an activity will take and so that you can optimize each day you are in Jeju.
Sora (01:11) Right, so the Jeju Trip Planner will also help you organize your itinerary by region so you don’t waste time going from east to west, like everywhere. So my favorite part is that it will even provide the KakaoMap link, the location of the destination, so it will be a lot easier to get to each destination.
Ed (01:34) So you can find the Trip Planner at vamosajeju.com/trip. That’s V-A-M-O-S-A-J-E-J-U dot com forward slash trip.
Sora (01:46) Yeah, so we are also going to put all of these places that we’ve been talking about in this podcast, so if you want to try building like a new itinerary of our suggestion, you should try it.
Ed (02:01) So it took a while to build this app and it’s actually something that we wanted to put out there in the universe so that our listeners could actually use it to more efficiently optimize their trip to Jeju. So I figured this would be a great time to walk everybody through how to get the most value out of the Vamos a Jeju Trip Planner and then maybe discuss who will really benefit from it and maybe who it’s not for because nothing is perfect and this app, there are certainly some limitations and may not fit everybody’s use case. But with that in mind, maybe we should talk about why we wanted to build this in the first place.
Why We Built It
Sora (02:47) So when I have a tour group, they don’t need this kind of planner. But if you are a DIY traveler, which I meet a lot on Instagram or my friends ask me about where to go and which is a good place, I have a list of the KakaoMap links. So I always prepare these and then send it to my friends.
But the thing is, if you don’t know me, how do you get this information? And even though they get the list, they need to arrange the itinerary again, like through their interest and time limit. So Ed and I were talking about this, how to have like efficient itinerary on Jeju and we are finally having this idea.
Ed (03:44) Yeah. And for me, being a DIY slow traveler, one of the things that really takes a lot of time is if I see something on Instagram or TikTok, or if I find something on a blog post or most likely when my wife Michele sees something on Instagram or TikTok, she’ll send it to me and go like, hey, let’s go there. And then I have to go figure out where the heck that is. Because usually the TikTokers or the Instagrammers, they don’t give a lot of information. They certainly do not tell you exactly where the place is.
So if you’re a DIY traveler, you got to figure out where this activity or place is in the bigger area, let’s say where is it in Seoul or where is it in Busan or where is it in Jeju or anywhere in the world actually. And so I need to get a sense of like where is this going to be so that when I do the actual trip planning, I know how to get there from my hotels or maybe even decide where to book hotels. So it helps to be able to have the location so that I can visualize in my head where everything is and how far it is, that I can plan things like travel time. And if a lot of the activities are clustered in one region, maybe it makes sense to book a hotel there.
And so the challenge I had, I’ve been facing, has been it takes so much time to find these places. And sometimes two places have a similar name. And if you’re not careful, you’re just going to go to the wrong place. And it’s happened to me before more than one time.
Sora (05:13) Last year I went to New York and then we didn’t know anything so I need to do the same thing. I have checked like many places on Instagram, save, save, save and then suddenly where are all these places? So I start to put pins on Google Map and of course it took a lot of time. So I was thinking like, Ed, you should make this for New York as well and then Ed is like…
Ed (05:28) Yeah. Noooo. Yeah, it’s the world’s a big place. Sora, let’s stay true to the title of our show, which is Vamos a Jeju. Let’s focus in on our favorite place, which is Jeju.
Sora (05:47) Okay, sorry. Ha.
Ed's Family Trip and How the App Works
Ed (05:54) And so nothing’s out there and since I have my good friend Sora here who knows so much about Jeju and since I also know quite a bit about Jeju, we figured we could be the change we want to see and build this darn app not just for our friends and families but for our listeners as well.
My whole family is going to go to Jeju at the end of this year for Christmas. And so I am actually having each of my family members and their partners go to the Trip Planner app to wishlist what they want to do. And that way they can find out more information. And my family members will not need the KakaoMap links because I’m going to be doing the driving, but at least they get a sense of like, oh, this is Seongsan Ilchulbong and here’s a podcast episode about it and here’s the article about it. And then when we are all ready to say, okay, what is our family’s itinerary going to be, at least everybody is on the same page on where is what.
Sora (06:49) So basically, we made this, I mean, you made this for your family trip, right? And then we start opening this to everyone for free. That’s good.
So when you get into the page, the web app at vamosajeju.com/trip, you’re gonna see like many activities. So number one, you’re gonna browse and put these activities to your wishlist.
And then step two, you put how many days you want, like two or three or four. And also the month of travel because there’s seasonal activities. So you choose that one and then you can build your itinerary for day one, day two, day three. It’s all DIY so you can put anything you want.
So after you put your email, we will send you an email. In that one, you’re gonna see all of the activities that you put in one itinerary with KakaoMap link, the GPS. So you can just click and then move to KakaoMap.
Ed (07:52) Right. And the email will also have more information on the activity that was wishlisted. So that way people will have an easy way to dive deeper into the activity if they wanted more information.
One of the things about the Trip Planner is that it’s very good for general planning to be able to visualize where everything is that you want to go to. You want to be able to see whether many activities are clustered in one concentrated area, or if they’re spread apart all over Jeju. That way, once you see where everything is on the map of Jeju, you kind of know, okay, here are all the spots on the eastern side of the island and here are all the things in the western side of the island.
Key Features — Regions, Time Slots, and Seasonal Warnings
Sora (08:33) It is really important to have these directions because as we mentioned, in Jeju, there’s the tallest mountain in Korea in the center. So it’s hard to cross the island. So you need to have these directions. And if you don’t know, me and my husband, we came to Jeju like long time ago, and then we didn’t know where it was. So we went to the east and then we went to west. So it was like a lot of waste of time. I think especially in Jeju, in an island with a tall mountain, the direction is really really important.
Ed (09:14) So another thing about the Trip Planner app is that it really helps you organize and optimize your itinerary. So there’s two words there and I use those words very intentionally, organize and optimize. As Sora had said earlier, it helps you to organize your day. So if you have three days there, it helps you organize them in like time slots.
That way you have a sense of how much time an activity will take. So by picking those activities, you first allocate your activities across the number of days you pick, but then obviously you go in there, change the time slots and change different days to fit your needs. And when I say optimize your itinerary, what the Trip Planner will do is if you pick one thing in the west like Sora was saying and one thing in the east, the Trip Planner will actually warn you about it.
Sora (10:04) So another feature that we have in Trip Planner is that some of the activities are seasonal, right? For example, we have cherry blossom for April and tangerine picking from November, December, January. Those stuff you can’t do in other months of the year. So we put the seasonal stuff like when you can do it and then the Trip Planner will give you the warning that you won’t have this activity for that time.
What the Trip Planner Does NOT Do
Ed (10:37) So those are all the things that the Trip Planner can do and we should probably be honest and say what are some of the things that the Trip Planner cannot do.
Sora (10:47) Definitely this is not a booking service. We are not going to book anything for you. So this is just like making a plan for yourself. Like we are just helping you to do it but we are not going to book these.
Ed (11:01) We did not build it with the intention to sell anything.
Sora (11:03) And another thing, it’s not based on like everyone’s review. Either Ed or I like the place. That’s why we put this activity on the Trip Planner.
Ed (11:13) I guess what we’re trying to say here is that it’s just based on our own subjective experience. The other thing that the app does not do is that it doesn’t pretend to have every single type of that activity in one category. So for instance, you will see like a green tea farm activity. Well, just know that even though we have multiple different green tea farms that will be sent into your inbox, we’re not saying that that is every single tea farm in Jeju. It is just the ones that we’ve been to. So just, I just want to set the expectations is that it doesn’t mean that every single possible green tea farm is there.
Who It's For and Next Steps
Sora (12:00) So to whom do we recommend this Trip Planner? First of all, DIY travelers, because you are traveling on your own and you need like a lot of information for research. So with this Trip Planner, you can save a lot of time and effort for free.
Also second can be like tour participants, because in Jeju we have some like one day tours. So you can also join that one. But the thing is if you want to compare what they offer and what you want to do, so you can try to do on our Trip Planner and then you can compare the itinerary with other companies as well.
So today we have talked about the Trip Planner we made for Ed’s family and also for you. So we hope this helps you planning your trip. For you, you can just visit our vamosajeju.com/trip and then you can try. If you see any bug, please send us an email.
I hope you enjoy and I hope it’s useful for the people who are planning to come to Jeju.
Ed (13:10) Y con eso, solo nos queda decir... ¡Annyeong!
Sora (13:15) ¡Adiós!
