The Travel Guide App: putting the traveller back at the heart of the trip

This piece is aimed as much at DMCs and inbound agencies discovering TOOGO as at those already working with us every day — the Travel Guide App concerns both, for different reasons.

About twenty years ago, in Mexico, I still remember with an almost strange precision my visit to Teotihuacán: the dry morning heat, the shortness of breath climbing the worn steps of the Pyramid of the Sun, and that feeling, on reaching the top, of towering over something far greater than myself. I didn't keep a single good photo of that moment — just very sharp, almost physical memories of what I felt on those steps.

Later, in Andalusia, it's a completely different memory: a small room in Seville, a flamenco singer whose voice cracked on a note, and that particular silence that follows, when a whole room holds its breath at once. And in Peru, climbing towards Machu Picchu with Wilber, a guide from Cusco, I understood why the Quechua communities speak of the mountain as a living being, the Apu, and not as a mere postcard backdrop.

Teotihuacán, Seville, Machu Picchu. They are places, but above all they are precise sensations, at a precise moment. Those are the journey — far more than the logistics, however well designed, that made it possible. And even though it's software, that's also what TOOGO is about: living experiences and helping others live them.

They are places, but above all they are precise sensations, at a precise moment. Those are the journey.

Behind these words, it's me, Lucie, speaking to you today. But it isn't only me. It's the whole TOOGO team. If you asked each of my colleagues the same question — which travel memory comes back to you most often — you'd probably get as many different answers as there are people on the team. A sunrise over a glacier for one, a meal shared with a local family for another, a simple conversation on a night train for a third. We don't all travel the same way, we don't all remember the same details, and that's exactly as it should be. What brings us together isn't a common way of travelling: it's the shared conviction that every journey deserves to be lived in its own way, and told in its own words. It's that collective conviction, carried by a whole team and not just by me, that gave birth to the Travel Guide App.

Before working at TOOGO, the management software designed for DMCs and inbound agencies, I spent years in the field, as a travel professional. Tailor-made itineraries, suppliers, middle-of-the-night emergencies, travellers accompanied from the first to the last day of their trip. And if there's one thing this job taught me, it's that travel is never just a series of well-executed services. It's an inner experience, a story you tell yourself as much as others.

In recent months, I've taken part in several tourism trade shows and conferences. And one idea keeps coming back, voiced by professionals as passionate as they are tired of tools that only think about booking: to travel is to connect the inside and the outside. It's that meeting between what you live outside — a landscape, a dish, a face — and what it awakens within us. And it's precisely that meeting that deserves to be told, while it's still vivid, not three weeks later in a satisfaction survey.

It's to put that meeting back at the centre of the journey that TOOGO created the Travel Guide App, the traveller module built into our platform.

In practical terms, the app is organised around simple markers: what's happening today, the current activity, where to sleep tonight, what comes next, and the whole itinerary viewable at a glance. And in the middle of all that, a space to drop a note — a text, a photo, a voice recording — whenever something is worth keeping.

During their trip, whether in Mexico, Andalusia or Peru, every traveller can take notes, record their voice, add their own photos to the app. Not just those of the provider or the inbound agency: their own, the ones that capture a precise, often imperfect but real moment. No need to be a great photographer or a great writer: sometimes a thirty-second voice note, taken sitting on the steps of a temple or at the edge of a mountain trail, says more than a long text written coldly once back home.

These notes aren't only useful for remembering later: they also allow you, in the moment, to step back from what you've just lived, to put words to emotions you don't always have time to express during the pace of a trip. This is especially true for the most expressive travellers, those who feel the need to tell what they're going through in the moment rather than keep it to themselves.

Each note can also stay private, or be shared with the rest of the group. And when the trip is taken together, something even richer happens. Each member of the group lives the experience their own way, tells it with their own words, their own images, their own rhythm. All these individual versions cross and form, without anyone really trying, a genuine collective travel journal — made of opinions that sometimes agree and sometimes contradict each other, of encounters told from several angles, of emotions that never quite look the same from one person to the next.

For us, this isn't just a nice feature added to a list of software features. It's precious material. These travel journals, these in-the-moment impressions, these details travellers choose to keep rather than others, directly feed the way DMCs and inbound agencies develop their own tourism products. We understand better what truly marks a traveller, wherever they are, what deserves to be deepened, and what, on the contrary, goes unnoticed despite all the effort put into it. The traveller becomes, without even knowing it, a collaborator on tomorrow's journey.

The traveller becomes, without even knowing it, a collaborator on tomorrow's journey.

That's the philosophy behind the Travel Guide App: it doesn't replace the work of the teams in the field, it extends it and gives it a memory. It gives the traveller the means to live their experience more intensely and to keep it intact for longer. And it gives us, and our DMCs, direct, sincere, unfiltered feedback on what we offer: real-time testimonials on the quality of a provider, an accommodation, an activity — immediate field feedback, far richer than a satisfaction survey sent three weeks after the fact.

As a SaaS management solution for DMCs and travel agencies, TOOGO already centralises quote creation, supplier management, CRM and the tracking of field operations. The Travel Guide App completes this all-in-one platform with a module designed for the traveller themselves, and no longer only for the agency.

We'll be delighted to show you more in the coming weeks: the Travel Guide App is one of the new features we'll present at our back-to-season demos, alongside our new interface, our redesigned CRM and the first developments of TOOGO Agentic, our future AI agent designed to support DMC teams day to day.

If you'd like to talk about it before everyone else, we'll gladly set aside a slot.