HooplaGuru helped our snowboarding trip go so smoothly.

Me and eight of my friends do an annual snowboarding trip, and this past year was the first time we used an app to help organize the trip.

Our first trip was back in 2018 to New York and it didn’t go as well as I had hoped. The first 15 minutes I was on the slopes I twisted my knee out and had to spend the rest of the time at the resort restaurants and bars. With hours to kill I bounced around some of the restaurants and my friends had a hard time keeping up with me on their breaks. We couldn’t find one friend for a few hours because he went down the backside of the mountain and had trouble getting back to us. Most of them couldn’t remember what time we wanted to wind down and head back to the lodge, so one night we didn’t end up having dinner until 9:30pm because everyone stayed up on the slopes. 

Our 2019 Colorado trip went much smoother. This time I organized our snowboarding trip we used the HooplaGuru app.had people flying in from 3 different states, and with the app I could track everyone’s arrival times and gates. I set Union Station as our meeting place once everyone was in town, from there we were able to collect our rental car and head to the lodge.

I planned out the different ski resorts we would hit and which days we’d hit them. With the app, I was able to tag the locations of the resort restaurants and bars where we planned to take breaks or meet for a quick drink, and I set times for each break so everyone knew when to get there. What was really great about the app was that we could track who said they’d be at which break spot, that way we knew who to wait for and who was staying on the mountain. I created a separate event for our group dinner, so even if you were the last one on the mountain you knew exactly where to head when you finished your run.

A bonus feature of the app was that we could share photos and videos of the trip just with each other. We didn’t have to airdrop with the 5 friends that had Apple and text the other 3 who didn’t. It was fun to look through them all at the end of the day to see who recorded some really good runs, watch each other eating it, and see some nice group photos. Everyone could easily download the ones they wanted from there.

We had one friend who had a military discount pass that let him go to other resorts, so when he wanted to meet back up with us, all he had to do was check the app to see which resort we’d be at and which restaurant we were taking a break at next.

No one had to text different people to see what was happening or wait for someone to actually check their phone if they even remembered to. We just opened the app, looked at the right day and time and we knew where to go. We had one of our best trips yet when I used the app to organize everything and we didn’t lose anyone on the mountain this time, and yes, that did happen in 2018. This app seriously saved us so much time and frustration compared to our first trip. I will definitely be using this app to organize my bridal shower and bachelorette party, and probably any other event.