My New Favorite Trip Planning Tool

What are your thoughts on Google Trips?

@ Tikiri Bandara -- It's unusable for me (or was when I tried it), because it requires (or required) you to sync with your inbox. I have too many flights being discussed in my email for that to be practical.

Great post! This looks better than any others I've tried. Does it have a print feature?

nice. I just created a little spreadsheet to plan out the days of my upcoming trip, but this looks nicer

Tiffany, can you forward confirmation emails to add flights or hotel stays with a trip? I use Kayak and it's a nice feature to avoid having to manually enter information.

@ Donna -- Yep, you can print the PDF, which organizes everything nicely.

@ Gaurav -- Nope, not at this point.

TripIt remains the best in the industry for me, especially for business travel.

I'll have to give this a try! Currently using TripIt but open to other apps!

I use Inbox by Google. It organizes trips automatically (and lots of other stuff). Then everything shows up automatically in my Google Now cards and Maps and Trips, etc. I'm talking reminders, flight data and info, directions to hotels and airports, weather at destination, things to do, and so on. No need for any of this stuff above or Tripit. No work.

I enjoy Tripit, especially the ability to forward confirmations and have it auto populate. But any non standard hotel confirmation trips it up (pun...). I end up manually inputting all the info. I appreciate that feature of Travefy where you just search for the hotel and it fills in maps, etc. I travel solo mostly, but I can sure see where Travefy sharing features would really come in handy. Tiffany, you might not be a spokesperson for Travefy, but you probably explained how it worked better than any paid spokesperson in the company. Thanks for sharing.

It's actually great to have the opportunity to manually organize my trips. I always book a lot of flights and hotels on a single day, and I will cancel most of them when travel time approaches. Google Inbox shows a lot of irrelevant itineraries that I no longer need.

I liked tripit but found it cumbersome to reschedule activities. I ran into travefy 2 months ago and really like the look and feel. The ease of drag and drop on the website makes it a winner. I'm using it to plan our most complicated trip yet. Found it just in time.

Tripit and Worldmate remain my go to travel planning apps for business and personal travel. Also easy to know how they make money... subscriptions.

I like TripIt but it seems like they haven't updated much in the past 3 or 4 years. Like their email parser still doesn't support a whole bunch of foreign airline's confirmation emails and if you aren't staying at a chain hotel it can't even parse for check-in/check-out dates. With their award tracker losing so many of its affiliates it's just not been that useful for me. I keep using it largely because it has a historical database of my travel and because at least twice now scrolling through their view of my trip has made me realized that i booked something for the wrong day.

What about Kayak Trips? You register and forward all your trip emails (flights, hotels, tours, restaurant reservations, etc.) and it puts it all together. You can share the trip with others and allow them to edit it and make printout outs too. Seems a lot more automated than this.

Definitely Kayak Trips, best Trip tool ever. I just forward all confirmations for flights, hotel, transfers etc. and seconds later most of them show up in my trips. If they can't add a confirmation automatically (for example a reservation agents wrote you a Personal mail with the details it takes few minutes/hours and someone from kayak adds it manually to your trip. For free!

Tiffany: Have you used tripit? You can set it to only sync what you forward to it and can manually enter anything you want as well...

@ avi -- I have, but I seemed to always need to edit things that had been forwarded, so that wasn't a huge timesaver. The output wasn't great for easily sharing either. I haven't used it in a few years though, so that could have changed.

Interesting, but inability to parse through at least the most common confirmations is a killer for me. Sure, I still enter a lot of manual info but not having to enter my 5-10+ flight itineraries is a big plus, especially after spending hours putting them together and playing HUCA to book them. The last thing I want is to spend any more time on that.

Disable TripIt inbox monitoring and just forward the confirmations you want to add. Made it much more manageable for me.

It's also been around for years, is owned by a large company and has outber services syncing to it (loungebuddy!). Who knows how long this new one will stick around before you lose all of your records.

This sounds really useful. I already find myself making calendars in Word, and then having a folder full of travel confirmations, etc. This would certainly help to organize everything.

But... How DO they make their money? I'm worried that they sell your information to advertisers, who can then target you based on the kind if travel you do, destinations you visit, etc. However, their privacy policy says they don't share your info, so maybe that's not their strategy (yet). They do have apps for professional travel planners, which presumably they charge money for, so maybe that's the idea. Also, their Terms say that they "may run advertisements and promotions from third parties via the Site related to certain Products, Services or Materials, in any manner or mode and to any extent". Presumably, they help advertisers target its customers based on what Travefy knows about them.

Planning tool: dunno...do it I my head.
"Tool that has all my travel info": after years of Tripit moved to kayak which is way better in parsing and visualizing. Worlds better. As said some human (not me!) fixes funky stuff the Tripit bot fails at.

If you are using kayak website (also my favorite due to filtering functions to optimize my business travel based on times and stops, but I know here some other power users use Matrix and google flights) or the app then you can save flights (and probably hotels too) as options that show up too as such: options/saved, not booked

I'm not affiliated with them, just a guy who runs around between zurich "all over europe" and a lot of China on business

The map is wrong. It seems to show additional boarders inside Palestine which should not be there.

They make their money from the "Pro" side is a subscription service aimed at trip coordinators. The personal side is the scaled down side for personal use.

Used to use Blackberry Travel then WorldMate. Tried TripIt but never warmed up to it. Currently using Kayak (web & app) for travel organisation and quite pleased with it. I forward reservations over to it and it's reasonably good about parsing them. Manually entering things isn't too bad either.

I travel internationally and domestically extensively throughout the year and use Kayak's trip function with great success.

Forward any ticket - airline, event, hotel, concert, theme park admission... Kayak will figure it out.

In the 4+ years I've used Kayak's trip functionality, it has botched 1-2 email confirmations. The rest have worked perfectly and it's such a huge convenience to have it build all my trips for me.

Tiffany, I highly recommend you give Kayak Trips a shot if you haven't yet! I also am not a fan of scanning the inbox automatically for travel since a lot of 'holds' end up messing up the calendar or adding stuff accidentally. Forwarding emails to [email protected] makes for an easy solution that is still 'manual' in the sense that you choose what to send it.

Literally all you have to do to start is forward an email to [email protected] and then it will email you to help you finish setting up your account.

I will try this next time I get ready to travel! I think this can help me a lot with the stress of planning a trip!

Any good alternatives out there now that Travefy Personal has been discontinued?