While cheap travel options, such as cheap airplane tickets, discount hotel rooms, cheap auto rentals, discount travel deals, and cheap vacation packages help make travel affordable, many a traveler has ultimately become frustrated dealing with printed confirmation emails for every flight, hotel, car, and restaurant reservation.
Travel apps can transform your confirmation emails into a single, easily shareable itinerary with confirmation numbers, addresses, maps, and detailed notes.
While most travel apps help make itinerary creation easy, each tends to be distinguished by different features, ranging from flight alerts, currency converters, airport spa locaters, to customizable lists such as Wines I drank along the way.
TripIt appears to be the simplest app to combine various travel emails into an itinerary. This app is free and has a clean, easy to read interface. Once you register for the service whenever you receive a confirmation email from a travel provider (such as an airline, hotel, or can rental company) or a booking service (such as OpenTable, StubHub, and Fandango) TripIt automatically imports your plans from your inbox, creating an itinerary with details including confirmation numbers, flight gates, and hotel addresses. You can share your itinerary with others and with social media followers.
If you are willing to pay $49 a year, you can upgrade to TripIt Pro, which comes with alerts for flight delays, gate changes, and better seats as they become available.
For the itinerary obsessed, TripCase, which is also free, might be more to your liking. This app allows users to forward their email reservations to an address and generate an itinerary. TripCase provides the ability to look at your itinerary in timeline view as well as action view, which includes a fun heading that shows when you are leaving. The app displays good maps. The action view has useful icons that allow you to check local weather and email your plans to others.
WorldMate (available for free and in a gold version for $3.99) is similar to TripIt and TripCase and automatically creates an itinerary when booking confirmations are forwarded to a designated email address. This app is designed for business travelers and comes with a currency converter, a tip calculator, and the ability to share your trip with your LinkedIn connections.
Awesome Note is a productivity app ($3.99 for iPhones) that will appeal to travelers who enjoy taking notes and making to do lists and who want a visually engaging way to categorize and share information. There are customizable folders as well as one pre-existing folder called travel journal which allows you to document your trip not only in writing but also with photos and art, if you select a drawing tool.
GateGuru allows users to automatically create a flight itinerary by forwarding travel confirmation emails or linking the app to a TripIt account. GateGuru is primarily a library of easy to read worldwide airport guides that include restaurants, shops, shoe shiners, ATMs, spas, lounges and free Wi-Fi (all of which can be filtered by terminal) as well as maps and links to social media sites. GateGurus primary attraction is its uncluttered, informative airport guide.
TripIt is the most intuitive itinerary app: sophisticated yet simple. Comes with no ads or games, while offering a color coded itinerary (hotel icons are orange, flights are blue) that can be accessed from multiples devices and easily shared.
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