Japan was lovely, so why do I regret how I planned my trip?
A first-time Japan trip, too many spreadsheet tabs, and why I built a travel planning app.
I wasn't a big fan of Japan before — I'll admit it. Too many people I know say cringe words in Japanese and act cringe in general because of anime, and that kind of turned me off. But I had to visit relatives in China, and since I live in Montréal (Canada), I had quite a few options to work with: Europe, the Middle East, Western North America (Vancouver, San Francisco), Southeast Asia, South Korea, and Japan. Japan just made geographical sense — there were cheap direct flights from Osaka to the airport closest to where my extended family lived.
It's definitely not the cheapest option overall. But I had a great time, I won't lie. The food was amazing — the rice tasted different, the fish was fresh, the snacks were better than anything back home. No offense, Canada. The trains ran on time, there were so many lines, and the stations were so big they felt overwhelming (I spent a full half-hour navigating Tokyo Station just to find the Shinkansen gate). Most importantly, they were clean. The people were nice and welcoming too, from cashiers to chefs to everyone in between. Just respect the country — don't film geishas running down the Gion alley, don't play loud music on trains — and you're all set.
Even with the unexpected heat, the rain, and the crowds, I loved every minute. Japan is a country that grows on you the more you think about it. It's the only place I've ever visited where I immediately felt the urge to go back. Please preserve your culture well.
But that's not really the point of this post. It's about how I could have done this trip better. Looking back, so much of the planning process was a disaster of my own making — not the trip itself, but the spreadsheet. The Google Sheet with tabs called "FINAL", "FINAL_v2", "FINAL_ACTUALLY_FINAL", and "DO NOT USE (use the other one)". Hundreds of places saved on Google Maps with almost no space to write descriptions. Long lists are always a hassle. A screenshot folder titled "FOOD MAYBE??" containing 49 items and approximately zero context for any of them. The other travel planning apps I tried felt cluttered and outdated — art style matters to me, and I don't want to navigate 67 tabs just to plan a week in Japan. Time is as valuable as money. I don't like apps that don't sync properly and lose hours of your work for no reason.
The other thing that bothered me: there was nothing in any of these tools about preparation. Etiquette. Language. I learned some Japanese, but not enough. Duolingo taught me how to introduce myself as a teacher, even though most foreign teachers in Japan are English teachers and I'm still a student — not super useful. I learned how to order at an izakaya by watching a salaryman call the waitress for another pint of beer. That worked. But I wish someone had told me that women in Tokyo are too polite to ask you to leave the women-only train cabin if you wander in by accident. I had to figure that one out myself.
Many days, even with my lists ready, I didn't really know what to do. Japan spoils you with near-infinite options, and the rain and midday heat forced me to rethink itineraries constantly. It's also a country where you walk a lot — especially compared to most of North America — so any plan that doesn't account for time outdoors is already half-wrong.
The trip was as good as it could be. The planning was the flaw. Everything I needed was scattered across too many places, in tools that weren't really built for this, and that didn't make me want to go outside. We all know what the benefits of going outside and touching grass are.
So I built Touch Grass.
What Is Touch Grass, Exactly?
One sentence: Touch Grass is a travel planning app with an honest name. It helps you plan trips without losing your mind, and it reminds you to go outside when you're not traveling. That's it. The name is half ironic, half sincere. Yes, touching grass is good for you. The app wants you to do both kinds of it — the literal and the metaphorical.
There are two distinct halves to it. The travel planner and the Touch Grass feature itself. I'll explain both.
The Travel Planner
The idea is embarrassingly simple: one place for the itinerary, one for places, one for the budget, one for notes. Here's how each one would have saved me from myself:
Itinerary — day-by-day activities with times, locations, and per-activity cost estimates. Drag-and-drop reordering for when you realize at 11pm that you've scheduled Fushimi Inari for the same morning as your Shinkansen departure. There's also automatic conflict detection — if you've double-booked a time slot or your activities physically can't all happen in sequence, the app flags it before you're standing on a platform wondering why you thought this was possible. And if it rains (which it will, in Japan, in summer), you can generate a backup itinerary for any day. The "wait, is that Tuesday or Wednesday?" conversation is officially retired.
Places — type a name, Google Places autocomplete finds it, and it gets pinned on an interactive map. Not a Pinterest board. Not a screenshot folder called "FOOD MAYBE??". An actual map, with actual context about what the place is and where it sits relative to everything else you've planned. There's also a skip list — places to avoid at a specific destination, with alternatives suggested. This would have saved me thirty minutes at a tourist trap takoyaki stand in Osaka I won't name but absolutely deserves to be on it.
Budget — six categories: flights, accommodation, food, activities, transport, and other. Allocated amount vs. actual spend, side by side. You can see in real time that buying every piece of pottery in Kyoto is going to make the flight home structurally unsound.
Accommodations & Transport — a dedicated section for where you're sleeping (check-in and check-out times, confirmation codes, booking URLs) and a separate one for how you're getting there and back (flights, trains, ferries, rentals, everything). Every booking detail in one place. No more screenshotting a confirmation email and hoping you can find it when you're standing at the hotel desk at midnight in a city where no one speaks your language.
Notes — a proper rich-text editor, not a voice memo recorded while walking uphill. A real place to write things down before the trip, during the trip, and after — when you're desperately trying to remember the name of that ramen place in Osaka with no menu, no English, and absolutely transcendent broth.
Phrase Guide — destination-specific useful phrases with local script, romanization, and English translation. Food, transit, shopping, emergencies, social. The kind of thing I was frantically Googling at the izakaya while trying to look like I knew exactly what I was doing.
The AI Features (An Honest Review)
There's a "Generate with AI" mode. You give it your destination, your dates, your rough budget, your travel style, and how you want each day to feel — slow mornings, packed afternoons, somewhere in between — and it drafts you a full itinerary. Is it perfect? No. Did it once suggest I visit a museum that closed in 2019? Yes. But as a starting point for a city you know nothing about, it saves two hours of frantic tab-hopping and gets you about 80% of the way there in 30 seconds. You edit everything after. The AI is the draft, not the final answer.
There's also Trip Chat — once you have an itinerary, you can edit it conversationally. "Move day three's afternoon to day five." "Add a morning walk before the temple visit." "I need a slower day two, I overestimated myself." It understands the context and updates things in place. This is either exactly what you wanted or something you'll never use. Both reactions are valid.
The AI model you get depends on your subscription tier. Free users get a fast, capable open-source model. Paid users get Claude. The quality difference matters most for complex multi-city itineraries — for a straightforward week somewhere, the free model does fine.
There's also an AI-powered packing list generator. It knows where you're going, what season it is, and what you've actually planned, and it generates a list that reflects your specific trip. Not a generic "don't forget your charger" listicle. A list that knows you're doing a day hike on day four and attending a formal dinner on day six.
The Touch Grass Feature
This is the half that gave the app its name, and the half that's harder to explain without sounding like a wellness startup.
It's simple: every day, Touch Grass suggests three outdoor activities near you, matched to your mood, your available time, and what you actually want from going outside. Not a curated Instagram feed of impossible places. Real suggestions. "Walk somewhere you've never been within fifteen minutes of your home." "Go sit by water." "Find the oldest tree in your neighborhood and sit under it for a while."
You tell it how long you have — anywhere from five minutes to a full weekend — who you're with, what you're after (clear head, exercise, explore, get off your screen, just move, nothing specific), and how hard you want to work for it. It gives you three options. You pick one, or you don't. No guilt, no streaks, no points. Just a suggestion and an exit.
There's a challenge mode if you want structure: timed, limited attempts, one-shot, or self-set terms you define yourself. You can save your favorite configurations as presets so you're not re-filling the form every time. "Quick solo walk, 30 minutes, low difficulty" — saved, one tap. And on the top tier, you can set a daily reminder: the app will email you at whatever time you choose and say, essentially, "hey, go outside."
No push notifications. No guilt mechanics. One email, three suggestions, your call.
The Design Rabbit Hole I Absolutely Did Not Need to Go Down
At some point during development, I started reading about Japanese design philosophy.
Ma (間) — intentional empty space. The idea that what you leave out matters as much as what you put in. Wabi-sabi — beauty in imperfection and understatement. Kanso — simplicity, the removal of everything unnecessary.
I implemented this as: a warm off-white background, muted sage green for primary actions, soft charcoal text, not a single loud gradient anywhere. Generous whitespace. Smooth, unhurried transitions. The app should feel like a well-made notebook, not a dashboard.
I also built a collectible theme system with 21 handcrafted themes — four come free, the rest unlock with a paid plan. There are themes based on seasons, cities, moods, and things I can't describe without giving the surprise away. Some are subtle. Some are not. This is either clever gamification or the most self-indulgent thing I've ever shipped. The jury is still out.
The app is also available in 12 languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. I speak maybe two and a half of those fluently. The translations were done carefully. Tell me what I got wrong.
The Collaboration Part
You can invite other people to edit a trip. You can share a read-only link. There's a public Explore feed where anyone can browse published trips without an account. You can export to PDF — for the one person in every travel group who prints itineraries and laminates them — or to .ics to push everything into Google Calendar, which is either extremely useful or just a very vivid way to see how aggressively you've overscheduled day three.
There's also a community guides section, which is where this post lives. Anyone can publish a travel guide or trip write-up. I want this to eventually become the honest alternative to travel influencer content — real trips, real budgets, real "I got completely lost for forty minutes and it was actually fine" energy.
I've tested all of this thoroughly, and I've sacrificed many nights making sure your data doesn't go anywhere you don't want it to. Only the people you choose can see your trips — unless you decide to share them publicly.
The Tiers
Three tiers, named after rarity levels in games, because I'm a person with a sense of humor about these things:
Rare — free. Five trips, the full core feature set, four themes, and a fast AI model. Enough to plan a real trip. Not a crippled demo.
Epic — $9.99 per month. Unlimited trips, unlimited places, more AI generations per month, the full theme library, PDF and calendar export, better AI models, and unlimited collaborators.
Legendary — $19.99 per month. Everything in Epic, the best available AI model, all 21 themes, unlimited generations, daily reminders, and priority support. If you travel more than twice a year, it pays for itself.
The free tier exists because I don't pay for most of the apps I use either, and I get it. Free users should have a genuinely great experience. If something essential is locked away that shouldn't be, tell me and I'll reconsider it. The goal is for the free tier to be enough to plan a full real trip — and anything gated above that is either genuinely expensive to run at scale or is there to fund the parts that aren't.
Japan was wonderful. I'd go back immediately, stay longer, and use Touch Grass to plan the whole thing — from the Shinkansen reservation to the izakaya I still can't find on any map.
If you have a Google Sheet with a tab called FINAL_ACTUALLY_FINAL, this is for you.
Don't hesitate to reach out if you find bugs or have ideas. There's a lineup of features I haven't announced yet — there are hints scattered around the app if you look. I'll be here.