Using Quip for Vacation Planning

By Mihai Parparita

My mom likes to be organized. When traveling, this manifests itself as a big folder with printouts of flight confirmation emails, directions to hotels, addresses, etc. A couple of months ago, she started to plan a trip to Hawaii that would be on the complex side: my relatives from England would be joining them, and there would also be a stopover in San Francisco. Once they got to Hawaii, the plan was to stay in cottages on two separate islands, and also spend a night closer to the volcanoes. She was about to have a very large trip planning folder.

Without too much prompting from me, my mom decided to give Quip a shot, to see if it would be a good substitute for the traditional paper folder. The first document she created was one that combined all the disparate scraps of information that she would need during the trip:

Notes document

This would still be accessible when rushing about the airport or even flying, thanks to Quip's offline support.

Once she realized that she was going to have more than one document about the trip, my mom created a shared folder for everyone in the family.

Hawaii folder contents

There was the requisite packing and to-do list, a folder for each island, ideas for things to do, and much more. My mom could then use read receipts to see when my aunt read the trip documents and nag make sure that all the preparatory work was done. For bits of information that originated from outside of Quip (like map drawings), file attachments came in handy.

File attachments

And just because this was all proper and organized doesn't mean that there wasn't an opportunity for a quip or two.

A quip