How to Plan a Group Trip From TikToks and Reels (When Everyone Sent a Different Trip)

Somebody said "we should do Seoul in May," four people said yes, and you said you would sort it out. Two months later the group chat is full of travel videos: a palace at sunrise, a salt bread bakery with a line down the street, a karaoke place, a four-day itinerary somebody swore was perfect, and another four-day itinerary that disagrees with the first one. Forty-odd videos, a lot of fire emojis, not one decision written down, and now you are the one searching for how to plan a group trip from TikToks and Reels.

Finding ideas was never the hard part. Your friends did that for free. The hard part is that a group chat is built for sending videos, not for deciding anything, and every person in it is quietly saving a different trip.

Why the group chat cannot plan the trip

Nobody is doing anything wrong. A chat is just the wrong shape for the job.

It sorts by time, not by place. The rooftop bar everyone loved was sent in July, between a meme and a question about flights. Finding it again means scrolling, and by the time anyone is booking, nobody scrolls back that far.

Videos get sent, not watched. A reel in a group chat collects a laughing emoji and an "omg yes" from people who watched the first four seconds with the sound off. The sender thinks the group has seen it. The group thinks the sender is handling it. Forty videos at thirty seconds to a minute each is about half an hour of viewing per person, and in a group of five, nobody spends it.

Everyone is saving a different trip. One friend sends hidden gems, one sends food, one sends the famous things you have to do once. Each video is a good idea. Together they add up to three trips that do not fit in one week, and it usually becomes obvious in the hotel lobby on day one.

What two plans for the same city look like side by side

These are five saved videos about Seoul, from five different creators, turned into one insight. Two of the creators each laid out a complete four-day plan, and the insight kept both:

That is a group chat in miniature: two people, each sure they have the plan. Read the plans against each other and three things fall out.

Most of it is already agreed. Both plans include Gyeongbokgung Palace and its Changing of the Guard, Bukchon Hanok Village, Insadong, Hongdae, N Seoul Tower, Starfield Library, the Gangnam Style statue, Olive Young, and a night in Myeongdong. Nobody needs to vote on any of that. It is the spine of the trip.

The real decisions are a short list. Between them the two plans name three different markets, Yeonseo, Namdaemun and Gwangjang, when a group needs one, maybe two. One plan heads out to Eunpyeong's quiet hanok village, the other walks a stretch of the old city wall. One goes up Lotte World Tower, the other goes to Dongdaemun Design Plaza. Those are genuine choices, and they fit on one screen.

The creators planned for a camera, not a group. The first plan's day two starts at Eunpyeong Hanok Village in the far northwest of the city, crosses to COEX in Gangnam for the Starfield Library, then comes back to Myeongdong for the night. That works for one person filming. For five people who walk at five different speeds, it is a day spent on the subway.

Lock in the overlap, then give everyone two picks

The fastest way to plan a group trip from saved videos is to stop treating every video as a vote. Most of them are agreement nobody has written down yet.

1. Put the overlap on the calendar first. Anything two creators recommend, or two friends sent, is in. Do not reopen it. If it has a fixed time, write the time down now: in the Seoul batch that is the Changing of the Guard at 10am and 2pm, and Bukchon, a neighborhood people live in, which the insight lists as open to visitors from 10am to 5pm.
2. Everyone gets two must-dos from what is left. Two, not five. A must-do is something you would be genuinely annoyed to miss, and saying it out loud now is how you skip the argument in the lobby later.
3. Everything else becomes a candidate, grouped by area. Not deleted. When a morning runs short, you pick from the candidates nearest to where you are standing.
4. Vote only on the collisions. If two must-dos need the same half day at opposite ends of the city, that is the one vote the group actually has to take.

Split the day instead of splitting the difference

Group trips go wrong when every stop has to be done by everyone, together. Five people moving as one block are slow, and every stop turns into a compromise that nobody picked.

Build the days with a split in the middle. The shoppers take Myeongdong and Olive Young, the palace people take Gyeongbokgung and Bukchon, and everyone meets for dinner. The together parts of the trip are then the things the whole group chose, not the average of five opinions.

Two things make a split work. Keep each half day inside one walkable cluster, so nobody crosses the city to rejoin the others: the method is in how to turn saved Reels into a travel itinerary, and it matters twice as much with a group. And book whatever a group cannot walk into. A counter that seats eight will not seat your five together, and the famous places queue. The Seoul insight's own tips are to get to Tosokchon early, before the line for its ginseng chicken soup builds, and to reserve busy restaurants through Catch Table where they take bookings.

How to plan a group trip from TikToks and Reels without anyone rewatching them

Everything above depends on one thing a group chat cannot give you: every video, from everyone, turned into text in one place. That is the part LilyBoard does.

When a video is worth keeping, tap Share and send it to @lilyboardco, from TikTok or Instagram, the same motion as sending it to the group chat. A few minutes later it is in your dashboard with the audio transcribed and the places pulled out. Pick the trip's videos, generate an insight, and you get what you saw above: every plan side by side, the tips kept as text, the places on a map, and the original clips linked.

Getting the group into it works two ways:

• One organizer, on the free plan. A free account is just you, so you forward the videos your friends drop in the chat. When the insight is ready, its Share option emails the whole thing to anyone you like, account or not, and the group reads one page instead of forty videos.
• The whole group, as a circle. On Standard, $5.99 a month, up to five people share one account. You invite your friends by email, each of them adds the Instagram or TikTok username they send from, and from then on everyone DMs their own saves to @lilyboardco. Every video lands in the same library with the sender's name on it, every insight is there for all of you, and the plan's 100 videos a month are shared by the circle. Standard also reads the text on screen, not just the audio.

The honest limits. LilyBoard reads the videos you send it, not all of TikTok, so it will not find places for you. It has no vote button: it makes the overlap easy to see, and deciding is still the group's job. Opening hours and closed days are only there when a creator said them out loud. A batch that mixes sightseeing and pure food videos can come back as two insights, one per category. And a pin comes from a search on the name the creator said, so check the address of anything you book: in the Seoul batch, N Seoul Tower got pinned in Gangnam, across the river from the real one.

Start with the chat you already have

Scroll back through the group chat tonight and pick the ten videos people were most excited about. Forward them to @lilyboardco, generate one insight, and share it back to the group before anyone books anything. The free tier covers 10 videos a month, no card, which is about one group chat's worth of "we have to do this." If you end up planning every trip together, the circle lets everyone send their own.

For the rest of the setup, from the DM habit to the map you land with, the travel enthusiasts guide walks through it.