TripIt: Did They Make This App Just For Me?? — Seeing (the world) 2̶0̶2̶0̶ 2022!

I may have found my new favorite app ever. For the past week, I’ve been trying to figure out how and where to best gather all my important travel data in one place. I mean, I love my huge dry erase wall calendar, but that’s gonna be tough to pack (haha). And Google calendar is our family’s lifeline for day-to-day plans, but it’s no good for seeing the big picture all at once. I have apps for expedia, Southwest, Airbnb, Home Exchange, Hertz, and so on. They’re all handy in their own ways, too.

But you know how when you actually get to the day or week of travel, and you’re trying to remember which site you used to book your car rental or hotel, so you can re-check the confirmation details? And then you’re like, “Crap. I booked this eight months ago. Who the hell knows?” Well, maybe it doesn’t happen to you, but we travel a lot, in a lot of different ways, so it happens. Even with all my careful calendar entries and apps, there are times when I’m scrambling to find my damn reservation at the airport at 1am.

So then I thought, fine, I’ll just make one master Google doc with all my confirmations/reservations/details in one place. Then I can do it my way, and I can add in plans of friends who will be joining us along the way. That’ll work.

But oh my god, did that turn out to be a pain. Going back and forth between webpages to manually add in the info? And don’t even get me started on how many different data points each booking site offers. Some have check-in times, some don’t. Some have contact phone numbers, some don’t. Google calendar really likes to f**k with time zones, which DRIVES ME UP THE WALL. (Do you hear me, Google?? Nobody wants to know what time it is in Colorado for a flight in Brussels!! Gah!!) I want consistent formatting, but trying to figure that out was surprisingly annoying.

So then I started searching good old fashioned travel journals. I’ll just carry a freaking book around with everything. There are lots of great ones - very creative and useful and even cute ones. But none of them is designed for a 14-month trip from place to place to place. So I was back to either just getting a blank notebook and winging it, or I’d need to buy a dozen journals to swap out every few countries.

Siiiiigh.

Then someone in a Facebook travel group asked a very simple question: “What are everyone’s favorite travel apps?” I can’t even remember why, but this led me to the Google Play app to search for something (maybe to remember a name of an app I had heard of before?). And, BAM, there was TripIt. I hadn’t been looking for it, but I clicked on the info anyway.

It was exactly what I’ve been trying to make happen! An app! Of course! There’s an app for that!

So dumb that I hadn’t thought of it, but better late than never. I downloaded it to check out the free version. I created my account and gave it a couple permissions, and voila! It added three of my bookings immediately (two flights and a hotel). Some of my other stuff had already been archived into my email, so I followed their instructions to forward the confirmation emails to an address and voila again!

I played around some more and found that I could merge all of the trips together pretty easily. Then I made Mike and Sagan get it on their phones and added them on as co-travelers to my stuff. Then I made my friend get it, too. (I’m very bossy when I’m excited.) So she can share her itineraries with me as a viewer, because then I know when I can pick her up from Heathrow and reenact our favorite scenes from Love Actually.

My mom is trying it out as a guinea pig to view our trip plans, and I’ve already bugged my sister and her husband about it, too. (At what point does TripIt send me money for this? I’m assuming I’ll be sponsored any minute now.)

I still have some stuff to fill in, but this has really helped me see which spots I need to work on along the route. We don’t want or need to book every day of the trip, but seeing it all in order is helping my brain organize the next steps.

I’m most looking forward to watching the travel stats get filled in. I love a good list, so I can’t wait to tally up the numbers of cities and countries we get to see. Less excited about seeing just how huge our carbon footprint will be…but I do love that they have that. Very thoughtful, and they add tips to suggest ways to reduce it along the way.