Nobody built a travel app for families. So I did.

I couldn't find a playground.

We were in a new town. My daughter wanted to play. Google Maps was useless for that. TripAdvisor didn't care.

Traveling without kids, you can wing it. With kids you need to know where to stop before someone loses it in the backseat. Where to eat before everyone is hungry. Where the playground is before you are asked for the fifth time.

It's a small problem. It's also a real one. And nobody had solved it well.

I'm a designer. So I started building.

It started simple

First I wanted to understand why Google Maps had so few playgrounds.

I dug into the data gap and found OpenStreetMap — free, open, community-built — with playgrounds everywhere. Thousands of them.

That was the moment. I could reuse real geographic data to build what I needed. No more driving around hoping to spot a swing set.

A map. Pins. Playground data from OSM.

You opened the app and saw what was nearby. No searching. No scrolling past irrelevant results.

It worked. So I kept going.

I added family-friendly places from government open data — farms, nature spots, activities that are actually useful when you are somewhere new with a child and no plan.

Then events: markets, local programmes, things happening near you. I found official open-data APIs across Spain, Portugal, and France — free, public, and barely used for this kind of product.

It felt like finding a gold mine nobody had wired into a consumer app.

Then I hit a wall.

The data problem

Government APIs are free. They are also patchy, inconsistent, and often years out of date.

Spain was decent. Parts of Portugal were good. Go slightly off the beaten path and the data fell apart — a playground that closed three years ago, a park with no description at all.

I could spend years patching gaps for one audience. Or I could ask a harder question.

What am I actually trying to build?

The real problem

The playground problem was a symptom of something bigger.

No app was designed to answer the question I was actually asking. Not "top restaurants in this city." Not "plan my two-week holiday."

Just: what is worth my time, right here, right now — and what is around it?

That information exists — scattered across Wikivoyage, OpenStreetMap, government databases, weather signals. But nobody had built the layer on top that makes it immediately useful without making you do the work.

That is what Planark became.

The pivot that wasn't

People ask if it was hard to shift from a family app to a broader travel product.

It wasn't, because I wasn't abandoning the original insight — I was finding the smarter path to it.

The family lens still matters. Playgrounds, pacing, kid-friendly stops. But first I needed to prove the engine: take any place and surface what is worth your time — fast, visual, grounded in real sources.

Same engine, different lenses. Families. Couples. Solo travelers. Slow weekend explorers.

What Planark is now

A year later, Planark is a working iOS app — with a web companion growing alongside it.

Regional discovery (Around / Loops) — open the app anywhere and see the geography around you: towns, loops, parks, and regions worth a detour. Structured by real travel geography from Wikivoyage, ranked by distance. No chat. No "where do you want to go?" search box. Just context.

City discovery (Plan) — when you have a destination in mind: highlights, hidden gems, local tips, climate hints, and where to go next.

Trip building — a short wizard (where, when, vibe) and a real day-by-day itinerary with a map. Multi-city routes are a core strength: logical road trips across regions, not a single-city checklist.

The AI is not the product. It orchestrates on top of verified data — Wikivoyage, OSM, WeatherKit, live context where needed. Time-of-day logic is deliberate: a café belongs in the morning; a viewpoint in the afternoon light.

No affiliate links. No booking pressure. No sponsored results dressed up as recommendations.

It works for you — not for the industry behind you.

Where this is going

I want Planark to be what you open before any trip — and what you open when you did not plan one.

The app that knows the difference between a town worth an afternoon and a region worth three days. That can plan a drive through a wine region with the same ease it shows you what is in the town you are passing through right now.

Richer events data. Deeper family filters. Shareable trips. Android. More web.

But first: prove the foundation. Prove that people prefer a tool that decides well and lets them refine — over one that waits for the perfect prompt.

That Saturday, looking for a playground in an unfamiliar village, I did not know it was the beginning of something.

It still feels like a problem worth solving.