An independent group vacation decision engine.
Every group trip I've been part of has followed the same pattern. Someone starts a WhatsApp thread. Three weeks pass. Twenty-eight messages, four destinations, no decision. Someone eventually gets frustrated and picks a place, and everyone else goes along with it not because it's the best choice but because the arguing is worse than whatever they pick.
The thing that breaks in group trip planning isn't the research. It's the coordination. Everyone has preferences they're not saying out loud — a budget that feels tight, a resort they hated the reviews of, a destination that triggers a kid's food allergy — and the group chat is the worst possible place to surface those things because everyone's answer is shaped by whoever spoke last.
Venn is built around one simple idea: collect everyone's preferences privately, find where they overlap, and surface one confident recommendation instead of a menu of options. No gatekeeper. No loudest voice. No endless debate. Everyone answers the same short quiz without seeing anyone else's answers, and the matching engine finds the resort that genuinely fits the whole group.
I'm Tom. I build small, focused products. Before Venn I worked on real estate tooling and a couple of other side projects; I'm not a travel industry person, which is probably the only reason I was willing to build this — someone from inside the industry would have told me it was a crowded market and stopped.
I started Venn because my own family and our friends have always struggled with the same pattern whenever we try to plan a trip together — long group chats, endless links shared back and forth, half-remembered resort names, tabs nobody ever clicks. I wanted a tool that would just ask everyone what they cared about and hand back one answer. When I couldn't find one, I built it.
Venn is live and being used by real groups. The most useful thing we've learned so far came from the earliest matches: our pricing estimates were too optimistic.
Early multi-family groups planning Mexico all-inclusive trips ran matches that were genuinely good — the resorts fit the groups' stated preferences — but the prices we estimated came in roughly 40% below the real cost once Mexico's taxes, resort fees, and peak-season surcharges stacked on top. Good match, wrong budget.
So we built a real-time price validation step into the matching pipeline. The engine now pulls live rates, applies a buffer for taxes and fees, and rejects any recommendation that exceeds the tightest budget in the group — asking the matching model for a cheaper alternative instead. That's the kind of fix we care about: a real problem surfaced by a real user, caught and closed with a real change to how the product works.
Venn is free to use. We're supported by affiliate commissions when someone books a resort through a link on our result page — you pay the same price either way, and the partner pays us a small referral fee. That's the entire business model. No banner ads, no email list sales, no data licensing.
Our commitment is simple: commission rates never influence which resort we recommend. The matching engine doesn't know which partners pay us more, and we don't tell it. Full breakdown on the Affiliate Disclosure page.
If you have a question, a bug report, a feature request, or a group trip story you want to tell, email hello@venn.travel. It goes directly to me.