What is Jaxbend

Be Curious, Not Judgemental [Walt Whitman]

It's always exciting to plan a trip into the unknown – but half of the problem of planning a trip is the unknown. In 2024, as I spent time trying to identify places to do overnight backpacking near a new city, the idea of Jaxbend was formed. The realization that there is no public platform to browse where others have been adventuring.

We're all adventurers, and for some places like the national parks, there are plenty of travel blogs to learn from. But, for a little weekend trip to escape the city – sources start to get limited. We're often doing our best to browse government websites, identify fees, sort out exactly what the location will provide, and uncover as many of the unknowns as possible. This can create a significant barrier to planning a trip that often leads to spending another weekend in front of the television instead of getting out and exploring.

Jaxbend aims to support the planning process into the unknown and ultimately, remove barriers to enjoying a trip – leveraging every-day travelers to share their knowledge with others.

Jaxbend

The name, "Jaxbend", comes from an adventure of my own – my second trip down the Au Sable River with a few friends and my wife. For me, it was my second time making the trek – for everyone else in the party – it was their first.

It was a trip where everything went wrong… we missed coordinating the meeting point in an area with no cellphone reception – which led to us sleeping in the parking lot. Our second day of the kayak trip thus had a huge amount of distance to travel.

Exhausted when we hit the slow-down in the river due to an upcoming dam, familiar landscapes started to register for me and I kept egging everyone on, "I think I recognize this, we should be able to see the campsite just around the next bend."

I was wrong… (more than once)… about it being "just around the next bend". It took two more hours of paddling through slow water before we finally reached our campsite.

My wife would tease me after that, "Oh sure, it's just around the next bend, right?"

Just Around The NeXt Bend

It was a terrible trip, but an excellent adventure. I wouldn't trade those memories for the world.

Our Core Beliefs

At our core -- we want to help you plan, organize, and enjoy an adventure.

Jaxbend is an itinerary planning service. Free to use with no subscriptions, no AI suggestions or content, no ads. Free to invite friends and family to collaborate with. We believe that the internet can be better; it can be a community again. Our goal is to put agency in your hands not only in planning your trip, but in how the information you provide gets used.

The Jaxbend marketplace is the driving force for how we make a profit. Sales from the marketplace are split, with 60% of the profit going to the user who created the trip and 40% to Jaxbend. That's the only scenario where we will share your data with strangers -- when you give us permission and you get a share in the profit.

Our stance on how an online business works isn't "normal", but it's a core part of who we are and our own moral compass. The rise of AI has lead to a significant concern over the accuracy of the information you are reading online. Every social media platform is filled with poorly created images and video. Every interaction with another user raises the concerning thought in the back of your mind that they may not be real. That's not to say that every application of AI is negative. The use of AI in the sciences to assist with cancer research, protein folding, and countless other areas are a positive. However, when it comes to the internet -- we can't help but feel that AI has become a net negative. As it stands, we actively aim to keep all AI generated content off of Jaxbend. Travel is a human experience.

So if I asked you about art, you'd probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo, you know a lot about him. Life's work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientations, the whole works, right? But I'll bet you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You've never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling; seen that.

This moral stance continues into how we view advertising and managing data. Inundating a website with countless ads doesn't benifit the user and foster a sense of community or adventure. Ads feel bad -- and we can never seem to escape them. Driving we see billboards, watching a movie we see product placement, there are ads in videos with additional "sponsored by" take-aways in the video itself. A vacation is an escape. Starting your trip in the planning process by subjecting you to unavoidable ads goes against the goal of the adventure. So, we don't do ads.

Additionally, the internet has grown into a cesspool of data brokers and sellers. If you are using a service with no product then you are the product. We're not on social media platforms and we never want to be like them -- quietly selling data so corporations can advertise more effectively towards your passions and insecurities. It bothers us, so we won't do it. Instead, we feel that the information you create, compile, document, and experience is yours to sell. So, we've created a place to do so -- where you control your information, and you can benefit from the sale of it.

How This Forms Us

With these choices in mind, Jaxbend had to make some concious choices of our own. Data costs money, and our moral philosophy impacts exactly how much we are willing to sacrifice for a profit. Take for example, the Jaxbend Mapping system. It's not the strongest option available, but it has the lowest cost to Jaxbend while still providing the services needed for users to build their trip. It's also a community driven mapping service, which falls into our goal of building a better internet community. If you'd like to contribute to the OpenStreetMap project you can donate here.

We also don't provide any suggestions or pricing information for locations for your trip. These suggestions would fall into advertising for a company. If you are looking for the cheapest hotels in an area, we're not here to help you find that. If we opened the door to providing those services, then we become an advertising service for businesses and it would be counter to our own beliefs. Take for example a vacation to one of our favorite cities, Grand Rapids, MI. If you are looking for good food in the city and we offer businesses the ability to advertise on our platform, our search results wouldn't do justice to the amazing food scene in the city. We encourage you to instead research on your own to make your own decision, or check the Jaxbend Marketplace for others who may have insight into the city and leverage their personal experiences in your own decision making. Flirting with advertising or promoting anything on the platform is counter to our moral philosophy. So, we leave the research to you instead.

We have one exception to the advertising rule. If a company sponsors a trip for us to highlight their business, we will do so. We will post a trip under our account with our review of the experience and will create a video for the adventure. This supports us in developing content for Jaxbend. This belief applies to users as well, if a user is sponsored to take a trip and wishes to publish it, we do not feel this violates our advertising policy.

Lastly, we actively avoid AI content. All of the trips that are posted on the Jaxbend Marketplace have been reviewed by our staff prior to being approved. Content is run through our internal review process, and AI content is rejected. We review images and run them through detection processes as well. Because of this the content for each trip in the Jaxbend Marketplace may have a unique voice, imperfect grammar or spelling, and non-professional video or images. We believe that an authentic experience from a user is valuable and don't modify their content at all. As long as we feel their trip is priced accurately, honest, and provides trustworthy information -- we will help users share their experience.

Planning a trip into the unknown can be scary. We want to smooth out that process by providing insight and inspiration. We also realize that part of the adventure is the unkown and trying something new. The insight provided by Jaxbend can act as a launching point to the trip, to highlight the positives and provide information into avoiding the negatives -- but we know that adventure and emotions come from experiencing the trip itself and until you are there, it won't be a true human experience. Get out, explore, enjoy.