Travelling, be it a two-day drive or a year-long quest, requires some planning. Unless you're travelling for business or to visit family, you're going to need some inspiring trip ideas to get you going. If you're going on a long road trip, you're going to need to prepare all the essentials; if you're going to the beach, you'll need to make sure the weather will cooperate; and if you're travelling with your phone, tablet, or laptop, there are several important things you're going to have to take care of.

After all this planning, with a trip that's bound to be awesome, isn't it a shame to keep your wild experiences to yourself? Sure, we all have Facebook and Instagram to share some photos and the occasional update, but don't you wish your family and friends could really take part in your travels, while sitting comfortable on their own chairs? Below you'll find several awesome services fit for all kinds of travel and travellers, that will help you share your past, present and future trips with style.

TripAtlas

TripAtlas is a one-stop-shop for exploring, trip planning, booking, and, yes, to share travel stories. Focusing on the latter, TripAtlas is a completely free to use platform to which you can add your trips and upload photos and videos, and includes a personal blog where you can tell everyone about your experiences.

It all starts from creating an account. Since TripAtlas is a community for travellers, your profile can include everything from your picture, website link and Twitter handle, to your travel interests, dream trips, and favorite places. Once done, you'll receive your own TripAtlas URL which you can share with family and friends.

You can then start adding your trips (simply add all your stops and TripAtlas will prepare a map for you), your photos, and your experiences. Your profile page can be private (just for you and people with the link), semi-public (only signed in users), or public. The page comes complete with Facebook comments, so your friends and family can tell you what they think.

TripAtlas is about more than just sharing your trips, and you can use it to create upcoming trips, add your plans, find out about great places to visit, ask and answer questions, and interact with a community of travellers.

Tweeted Trips

If TripAtlas seems like way too much work for you, Tweeted Trips might be what you're looking for. Want to share your travel experiences easily? All you need is a Twitter account and a location-enabled device. Enter your Twitter username in Tweeted Trips, and the service will automatically scan your last 50 trips, and add them to your map. You can then edit the map before you publish it, and set it to automatically add all future location tweets to your map. That's it. Your map will now be updated every time you tweet again, letting others follow you around in your travels.

The only disconcerting thing about Tweeted Trips is the complete lack of any sign-in or authentication process when creating the trips. This means anyone can create a map for any Twitter account, and while sign-in is required to go back and edit an existing map, it's not required for the initial creation. Then again, your tweets are public anyway, and if you chose to add a location to them, you probably shouldn't care about someone creating a map out of them.

TravelPod

Are you serious about sharing your trip adventures? TravelPod is an amazing travel blog website made especially for travelers, letting you easily share travel stories and experiences, photos, and itinerary. TravelPod lets you set up a map featuring all your stops, where each post represents another point in your itinerary. Visitors to your blog can see the course of your whole trip, read your entries in chronological order, or pin-point a certain destination and read only about that.

Each blog post can have photos to go along with it, and, of course, a map to show the place it was written in or the place written about. Your visitors can leave comments and interact with your posts, view slideshows of your photos, and share your posts on social networks. As a blog owner, you get access to some blog analytics, and can also make use of TravelPod's iPhone or iPad app to update your blog on the go.

Of all the options I tested for this post, TravelPod was my favorite, and made me truly wish I'd known about it last summer, in time for my own trip. Read a full review of TravelPod.

Go Pro Travelling

Want your family and friends to feel as if they're travelling with you? Give Go Pro Travelling a try. This fun service lets you create your own travel map with stops, and then play your trip from start to finish, complete with music, photos, and comments about each leg. To start creating a map you don't even need to sign in, simply give your trip a name, choose your background music, and start adding destinations and dates. For each leg, you can choose whether you traveled by plane, car, bike, or on foot. Unfortunately, there's no train option.

If you sign up, you can save your map, add photos to your legs, and share it with your friends. They can then sit back and watch you fly, drive, bike and walk across the Earth, along with your photos and stories. If you can't imagine it, give it a try, it's surprisingly fun.

How do you share travel stories with family and friends? Have a great service, website or app to recommend? Add them all below!