Travel apps have quietly become excellent. The best of them are built by small teams who fly a lot and sweat the details, and if you take two or three trips a year, the right one earns back its subscription on the first delayed flight or double-booked afternoon. But they are excellent at different things, and most comparison lists will not tell you that, because most comparison lists are written by whoever ranks first, about themselves.
I build one of these apps, so read what follows knowing that. My promise is the opposite trade: I will tell you plainly what each rival does better than anyone, including better than mine, and where the gap is that I have spent my year on.
Flighty owns the flight
If your travel pain is the airport, stop reading and get Flighty. It tracks your plane across the day's earlier legs, warns you about delays one to two hours before the airline admits them, explains why you are delayed, and its alerts feel like having a pilot friend on the inside. It won an Apple Design Award and deserved it. It does nothing else: no itineraries, no hotels, no plans. That focus is the product.
Free tier · Pro at $4.99/month or $59.99/year · first flight free
For the frequent flyer whose trips are mostly flights.
Tripsy owns the reservation
Tripsy is the tidy binder: forward a confirmation email and it files flights, hotels, and activities into a clean timeline, syncs to your calendar, and shares with family. It is polished, reliable, and runs everywhere Apple does, watch included. Its planning stops at the reservation level; the hours between check-ins are yours to figure out.
Free tier · Pro at $9.99/month, $59.99/year, or $299 lifetime · family shareable
For the organized traveler who wants every booking in one place.
Wanderlog owns the group plan
Wanderlog is where six friends plan one trip without murdering each other: live collaboration, a map of everything, votes and notes, route optimization on Pro. Its free tier is the most generous in the category. The experience is the spreadsheet made friendly, web-first at heart, and it shines before the trip more than during it.
Generous free tier · Pro at $39.99/year, annual only
For group trips and the planner personality who loves the planning.
TripIt is the incumbent
TripIt invented forward-your-email-get-an-itinerary, and two decades on it still just works, across every platform your company might force on you. Pro adds airfare refund alerts and seat tracking. It feels like the enterprise tool it has become, and it will outlive us all.
Free tier · Pro at $49/year
For business travelers, and anyone whose trips arrive by email.
The gap: the day itself
Here is what I kept noticing as a traveler: every app above is at its best before the trip or at the airport. Then you land, and the trip becomes hours in a real place, and the apps go quiet. The 9:30 temple, the way to the night market, whether the bus or the train, where tonight's hotel sits relative to the last stop, the ticket you need at the door, the friend who needs the same map in her pocket when the signal dies.
That is the gap I built Journey for. It plans the day the way a day is lived: places in order, times that matter, the way between them already answered with real transit. It is built for two people on one trip, with every place, plan, and document in both pockets, offline. And it carries a companion, Awen, that reads the trip the way you would three months early: the visa you did not know you needed, the connection that is too tight, the two stops sitting a street apart on different days.
Journey arrives on iPhone this November at $4.99/month or $39.99/year with the first week free. Until then my wife and I are traveling on it ourselves, and there is a list for people who want it first.