Travel App Review: TripIt
In the latest article for this week’s Travel App Review series, we’ve got the app (and website) TripIt. I’m a big fan of organisation and, in the age of Covid-19, this is more important than ever. Firstly, let’s run over the top features that are in TripIt:
Central location to forward on all your bookings including flights, hotels and other transportation mediums, as well as reservations for restaurants
Automate trip creation by turning on integration of TripIt with your email service - or have limitless customisation through editing trips yourself.
Create a hub of all trips upcoming and historical
Keep track of information offline, even when you’re contending with no mobile signal or dodgy airport WiFi (*ahem* Istanbul Airport or Doha Bus Gates)
Add documents that will be useful for your trip
TripIt is all about making your vacations or holidays away simpler and quicker to keep track of.
Why I love the TripIt app?
I’ve been using TripIt for around three years and it’s really simplified travel. I’ve often been on my complex trips which piece together several different bookings across different airlines, alliances and hotels which can be difficult to keep track of - and nigh on impossible if your phone doesn’t have a good internet connection. An example below is the complexity of a trip I’ve imported to the app:
LHR to ARN on BA
ARN to BKK via DOH on Qatar Airways
Bangkok hotel reservation from Trip.com
BKK to HAN on AirAsia
Hanoi AirBnB reservation
HAN to SIN on Scoot
Singapore AirBnB reservation
SIN to KUL on Malaysia Airlines
Alila Kuala Lumpur Hotel reservation from Hyatt.com
KUL to SIN on Air Mauritius
Hotel reservation in Singapore via Hotels.com
SIN to ARN via DOH on Qatar Airways
ARN to LHR on BA
Keeping track of this across different apps or even paper based would be difficult but TripIt can simplify this. It’ll even calculate your layover times and pull out important information like confirmation/reservation codes on the front screen to make this information more accessible. Next year, I plan to travel to Japan with friends - the app even allows sharing of trips for collaboration making it sooooooo much easier to plan trips collaboratively.
Covid-19 specific features
As people begin to travel more often as vaccinations increase globally, TripIt has integrated features to make travel simpler in the age of Covid. Although this is an appreciated feature, I do question the usefulness. An example below:
Firstly, it’s categorisation of countries…it’s not at all useful. Cyprus, the UK and Germany are all classed as “extreme” risk for Covid cases per 100,000 of population - but there’s almost a five fold number increase in cases of Covid between Germany and Cyprus/UK. The advice given on the app also isn’t particularly up-to-date either - Germany states testing is required but this isn’t the case for vaccinated passengers travelling from the UK to Germany. My advice for people is to take the Covid-19 guidance with a pinch of salt and refer to the countries respective government’s website for the latest information - as opposed to any third parties.
What’s not to love about the TripIt app?
The user interface of the TripIt app is pretty good and intuitive, which is how you are most likely to use the service whilst travelling. However, if you’re like me, you will likely be pre-planning your trip from your laptop - this is where it starts to fall behind a little bit. Although TripIt have begun to make some improvements to parts of the TripIt.com web experience, it’s still behind the app and parts look as if they’re straight from 2008. With their new beta in place, I hope that this experience improves significantly over time.
Other annoyances with the app, or it’s integrations, can be the flakiness with which TripIt sometimes performs in importing from my mail service, Gmail. This has been very unreliable recently and hasn’t been properly importing to the TripIt app. This can be solved by forwarding the email confirmation directly to plans@tripit.com which will link it to your account (providing the email address it is sent from is attached to your account).
The verdict
Although I love the design of apps like Finnair, for travel on oneworld alliance airlines, the flexibility and complexity available on TripIt really put it head and shoulders above others in the travel app field. The free functionality is fantastic and with very few advertisements. A “pro” tier is available for USD 49 per year which mostly adds improvements such as gate notifications at the airport, dynamic flight updates and access to additional document uploads. If you’re a frequent traveller, this may be useful - but for the rest of us, the free version is more than enough.
As a reminder, this article is not sponsored. These reviews are of apps I genuinely use and find make my travel life simpler in the hope it can help you as well.
