I'm building TravUp — a verified travel knowledge base created through human expertise and fieldwork from over 50 cities

Hi Travel Massive community, I'm building TravUp and I'd love your read on my project.

Travelers can now book nearly every component of a trip online. But turning those bookings into a journey that actually works remains remarkably difficult.

Flights have been digitized. Hotels have been digitized. Activities have been digitized. Travel expertise has not.

For those of us building travel products, the question is no longer whether AI will influence the journey. The question is whose knowledge will it rely upon? And how will that knowledge be verified? These are the problems we are solving with TravUp.

A quick note on how I got here

Before entering travel, I earned a PhD in oil refining and spent nearly two decades managing international teams, complex operations, and billion dollar budgets. Then I left that career to pursue something I genuinely loved: creating immersive travel experiences.

I first launched a company that designed multiday journeys extending far beyond traditional sightseeing. The goal was not to visit famous landmarks, but to help travelers understand a country through its history, culture, food, local stories, and everyday life. With only three tour programs, we were receiving 250 to 300 inquiries every month. The response confirmed that travelers want carefully designed journeys where every stop, transition, and recommendation had a purpose.

But the model could not scale. Every journey required weeks of research, field testing, logistics planning, and refinement by experienced travel designers. We could create these experiences for only a limited number of travelers. That realization forced us to ask a different question: could we scale travel expertise itself?

The problem we eventually found

At first, we assumed travelers needed a better planning tool. The deeper we looked, the more we realized we were solving the wrong problem. Planning was only part of the challenge. Execution is a real problem. Travelers spend weeks researching a multiday trip and still encounter costly mistakes once they are on the road.

The travel industry has become remarkably good at helping people book flights, hotels, rental cars, activities, and restaurants. But someone still has to connect those pieces into a coherent experience. That requires deciding what to visit, in what order, how long to stay, when to slow down, and how to account for opening hours, travel times, and local conditions. These decisions determine whether a journey feels natural or rushed.

Experienced travel designers make these decisions using knowledge accumulated over years. Their value lies not only in managing logistics, but in understanding how hundreds of small choices affect the overall journey. We realized that the missing layer is not another booking platform. It is travel expertise itself.

How we're solving it

This insight shaped the development of TravUp. Rather than asking AI to invent journeys from scratch, we began capturing and structuring the knowledge that traditionally lives inside the heads of experienced travel experts.

AI can produce an itinerary in seconds, but that isn't enough. A great itinerary is not just locations and content. It is a sequence of decisions that works in the real world. Ignore opening hours, travel times, seasonal changes, local conditions, or a traveler's natural pace, and one mistake can mean hours lost on the road, missed experiences, unexpected costs, or unnecessary stress.

At TravUp, we chose to begin with something less visible but more fundamental: a verified travel knowledge base created through human expertise and fieldwork. Routes are researched, traveled, tested, fact checked, and refined before AI enters the process, every stop filled with immersive storytelling. Cultural and historical information is cross referenced with reliable sources, because trust matters as much as convenience.

Today, that knowledge base supports 13 journeys tested in the field across more than 70 cities in four countries, including more than 10,000 curated images, over 200 hours of narrated audio, and hundreds of practical decisions handled on the traveler's behalf. Only then does AI enter the process, not to replace expertise, but to personalize how it is applied to each traveler's interests, pace, budget, and changing circumstances. For us, that is the difference between generating an itinerary and helping someone navigate a journey.

What I'd love from this community

Today, TravUp is live. Now we're focused on early adopters, like you, and before we push harder on growth I want to pressure test the core thesis with people who understand this industry deeply.

My ask: what do you make of the approach? Does the idea of a verified, human built knowledge base as the foundation for AI resonate with how you see travel technology evolving? Where do you think it is strongest, and where might it fall down?