Roadtrippers for Power Users
Power users planning 40-stop trips were splitting itineraries to survive the interface, keeping themselves under the paywall the subscription needed them to cross. I redesigned the planner around how long-haul road trippers actually think and rebuilt the foundation underneath: five contrast-locked color ladders, modular components, local-time at every stop. The architecture became Bonfire.
The Short Version
Roadpass Digital is the parent company behind a portfolio of outdoor travel apps. Roadtrippers, the road trip planning app, was the highest-traffic and highest-revenue product in the portfolio.
Roadtrippers ran subscription-funded planning tools for users building everything from weekend drives to multi-week cross-country trips, with brands like Mapbox, KOA, and Good Sam integrated into the experience.
The product addressed a specific gap incorrectly. Roadtrippers was great at weekends and bad at longer trips. Power users planning 40-stop cross-country itineraries had to fight the interface to get there, and most of them split their trips into pieces to survive it. Each chunk stayed under the stop count the subscription funnel needed them to cross. The product was failing the users paying it the most attention.
That chunking pattern hid the conversion problem in the data. The power users it should have been catching never reached the limit because they’d already worked around it. The most engaged users on the platform were the ones the product was failing hardest, and their workaround was hiding the failure in the funnel.
I redesigned the planner around how long-haul road trippers actually think and rebuilt the architecture underneath. The screens have aged out. The foundations survived: five contrast-locked color ladders, modular components that let later features plug in without rebuilding, local-time rendering at every stop. Power-user engagement rose 30%, multi-leg planning rose 20%, and feature development time dropped 35%. The architecture became the foundation of Bonfire.
