TripIt vs Wanderlog vs Travlin: which one runs a trip you already booked?

You have a trip booked. The flights are paid for, the hotel is confirmed, the rental car is somewhere in your inbox. What you want now is not to plan anything — it's to stop losing the pieces. So you go looking for an app, and you find three that all describe themselves as "travel apps," and it isn't obvious which one is for the situation you're in.

Here's the thing that clears it up: TripIt, Wanderlog and Travlin aren't three versions of the same tool. They do three genuinely different jobs. Once you can see which job you actually need done, the choice mostly makes itself.

Wanderlog: for the trip you haven't booked yet

Wanderlog is a planning tool, and a good one. You start with a blank map, drop pins on the places you want to go, and it draws the route between them and can reorder your stops so you're not doubling back across a city. You can plan it with other people in real time, split costs, and keep the whole thing available offline for when you're somewhere with no signal. It's free, with a Pro tier around $40 a year that adds offline maps and PDF export.

If you're still deciding where to go and what to do — a road trip with six stops, a group weekend nobody's booked yet — Wanderlog is probably the best of the three for you, and I'd send you there happily. But notice what it's built around: the unbooked trip. The decisions, the maps, the maybes. The moment your trip is actually booked, most of that machinery is behind you.

TripIt: for listing the trip you have booked

TripIt is the one most people mean when they say "the app that organizes your trips." You forward your confirmation emails to it, and it builds them into a clean, dated itinerary automatically. It's been doing this well for over a decade, and the free version handles the core job. The Pro tier, at $49 a year, adds real-time flight alerts, a seat tracker that watches for a better seat opening up, fare-drop notifications, and rebooking options when a flight falls apart.

That's a real product with a long head start, and if all you want is a tidy list of what's happening when, TripIt does it. But a list is where TripIt stops. It shows you that your connection is at risk; it doesn't tell you whether your connection, in your terminal, with your bag, is actually makeable. It puts the facts on screen and leaves the thinking to you.

Travlin: for running the trip you already booked

Travlin starts where TripIt stops. You get your booked trip into it the same easy way — paste a confirmation, or forward one — and it builds the itinerary. That part looks familiar. The difference is what you can do next: you can talk to it.

Instead of reading a row that says your layover is 55 minutes and working out for yourself whether that's enough, you can ask. And the concierge answers with your actual trip in mind — the terminals you're connecting through, whether you've got a checked bag, what your options are if it's tight. It's the difference between a timetable and someone who knows your trip sitting next to you. That's the whole reason Travlin exists, and it's the thing neither a planner nor a list is trying to be.

Travlin is free during Early Access right now. You can see how the itinerary itself works on the how-it-works page, and if you've ever had a booking come apart at the worst moment, what we wrote about cancelled flights is the clearest example of what "runs the trip" actually means in practice.

So which one do you need?

Line the jobs up and it's straightforward:

• Still planning an unbooked trip — routes, maps, a group deciding together? Wanderlog.
• Just want a clean list of a trip you've booked, and you're happy to work out the judgment calls yourself? TripIt.
• Booked, and you'd rather ask a question than dig for the answer? That's Travlin.

They're not really competing for the same moment. Wanderlog wants you before you book. TripIt and Travlin both want you after — but one hands you a list, and the other answers when you ask "will I make this connection?"

If that second thing is what you've been missing, you can try it in about ten seconds without making an account: paste a booking confirmation into the box on travlin.ai and watch it become a trip you can talk to.