Scappa

Context

Planning a trip should feel like the start of the holiday, not like a second job. Yet that's exactly what it had become. Travelers were juggling Notion pages, Excel sheets, screenshots, booking confirmations buried in email, and inspiration scattered across a dozen apps. The tools existed everywhere — and that was precisely the problem.

Everything everywhere,
connected nowhere

Early research into how people actually plan their trips revealed a clear pattern. Not a lack of tools, a surplus of the wrong ones, working against each other, never designed to be used together.

Planning was fragmented

Itineraries lived in spreadsheets, tickets in inboxes, ideas in screenshots — and nothing was connected across tools that were never made for travel.

Automation or control — never both

Existing travel apps forced a binary choice: fully automated suggestions with little control, or rigid manual tools that demanded effort before giving anything back.

Tools went silent mid-trip

Once the trip started, planning tools fell silent — leaving travelers without their information at the exact moment they needed it most.

Design for the
planner within

The most important insight came early: there is no single type of planner. Some travelers want a complete itinerary generated in seconds; others find joy in crafting every detail themselves. Most are somewhere in between.

So instead of choosing a side, Scappa was designed around flexibility. The guiding principle stayed the same throughout: reduce friction, never add it.

"An app that adapts to the traveler, instead of the other way around."

A complete travel
experience, shipped

Scappa launched as a complete, live travel planning experience on iOS and Android. Removing the cognitive load that made trip planning feel like work, and turning it back into part of the adventure.

Takeaway

Great product design isn't about picking between automation and control, it's about respecting that real users want both, at different moments.

By designing for how people actually plan, rather than how an app thinks they should, an idea became a live product that makes escaping a little easier.