Best apps for building a shared travel itinerary

"Do you have a recommendation for apps where you can build a shared travel itinerary? I’m helping my family plan a Christmas trip. I usually go the shared iPhone note route but my mom wants to see if there’s an app that can easily do this." — Emma G

I, too, am a Notes app devotee, but I hear you (or, your mom in this case). Planning a trip with multiple parties can get chaotic, and surely an app can help keep things organized.

A quick Google search yields an infinite scroll of results. And after I put the call out for recommendations, I learned about even more that people swear by — from complicated to streamlined, free to pricey.

Which makes sense for your family trip? Here are a few standouts.

Fun and thorough: Wanderlog

Wanderlog was by far the most recommended tool from my callout. It’s available on Apple and Android, for mobile or desktop.

With the free version, you can collaborate with other users to build out a detailed itinerary. You can input details such as flights, hotels and rental cars, leave notes for the group and attach photos or files. The Pro version, which costs $39.99 per year, builds on the free perks with such upgrades as the ability to export your plans to Google Maps, automatically scan your Gmail for updates and access the app offline.

Marie DeCosse — founder and CEO of Nomad Travel Groups, a house-swapping platform — said Wanderlog is her go-to resource as the designated trip planner for her friend group. She likes that it’s easy to start a trip template, that you can assign tasks to group members and that the app is integrated with Google Maps. A huge incentive is that Wanderlog shows when and how other people have edited a trip, which "keeps the group honest," she said. "I like to — as a micromanager — kind of see who’s on top of things and who isn’t to easily follow up with them."

Casey Keller, owner of the travel blog Wandering Everywhere, said she likes that Wanderlog gives users a helpful overview of each day and that the platform makes it easy to print out itineraries "for family members who feel overwhelmed by apps [or] technology."

I downloaded Wanderlog and found it fun to use, as if it had gamified travel planning. It’s full of helpful features (like being able to keep track of group expenses). But it also felt cluttered between the activity recommendations, AI travel assistant and many tabs. It might be going overboard for a simple trip with your family.

Clean and straightforward: TripIt

TripIt was the second most recommended tool, with fans including tour guides and consultants. It has been around since 2006 and can be used on desktop or mobile app, for free or with a Pro version ($49 per year).

It’s easy to set up a trip and "invite others" to edit the plans. It’s also easy to populate your itinerary by forwarding emails with reservation confirmations (flights, dinner plans, hotel bookings) to plans@tripit.com, which automatically uploads the item into the trip. The free version also syncs those plans with your calendar and shows airport maps and transportation options, among other perks. The pro membership has such bonus features as tracker that notifies you if a better price or seat becomes available after you book a flight.

DeCosse said that it was the first travel planning app she downloaded and that she appreciates its ability to send you real-time alerts, but that it does take some manual input.

I signed up for a Pro account and saw what she meant; there are a few setup steps to make the most out of the tool. But I also found it freeing to simply email my reservation confirmations to the TripIt account and know it would be collected in one place; Wanderlog can do this, too, but you need to use a unique email address for each trip versus the easy-to-remember one for TripIt that automatically sorts the reservation into the correct trip or starts a new one for you.

It felt like a worthy investment of my time to learn and use TripIt — not just to wrangle friends, but for all of my travel plans.

Basic and free: Google (Docs, Sheets, Maps)

Not a sexy app. Not even a single app, actually. Not specifically for travel. Still, many people told me they prefer to use various Google apps — Docs, Sheets and Maps — over specialized one-offs built for travel. It’s also how I prefer to plan travel beyond the Notes app. I save all of my restaurant wish lists in Maps, create tip sheets in Docs — and skip Sheets because I’m not a spreadsheets person.

If you’re a Google user, these apps are familiar, easy for group collaboration and free. You can find customizable travel planning templates in Google Docs or Sheets, or make your own.

Travel writer Michelle Jensen has planned trips across Europe with friends using Google Sheets; she makes columns for city, date and time, and color-codes line items by category (flights in yellow, hotels in orange, excursions in teal, for example).

"It’s super simple to use as long as you have a Google account, and anyone who’s used Word or Excel will know how to use it, so there’s no learning curve," she said.

You can also take your Sheets and Docs organizing up a notch with "Place Chips" that will insert a Google Map pin directly into your planning doc, so you can pull up your itinerary while you’re on the road and easily navigate to the destination.

Best of the rest

Here are a few other apps that came up in recommendations:

Travefy: If you want to feel the most like a travel agent, Travefy may be the tool for you. It’s marketed as the itinerary builder preferred by travel agents (although none of the people who recommended it to me are!). Event planner Vanessa Gordon told me she swears by building itineraries for personal and business group trips with the platform but warns there is a learning curve, because the software is designed for travel professionals. "It looks very complicated at first … then you like it," she said. Membership starts at $20 per month, billed annually.

Notion: Not strictly a travel app but an "all-in-one workspace" to help you write, plan, and organize projects and tasks. It has free and paid trip planning templates that multiple people can use together.

Pilot: A collaborative travel planning app that one customer review said was "a better version of Notion," with an easy-to-use interface. DeCosse likes that you can see what others in your group have contributed and that it seems designed for social media-savvy travelers.

Roadtrippers: As you can guess, this one is specific to road trip planning and offers live collaborative editing.

Corner Maps: Billed as "Google Maps but social," it’s very Gen Z-coded. You can create a collaborative map ahead of a trip and import points of interest from TikTok and Instagram posts. Or it can create a personalized map for you based on categories of interest like "actually good food" and "matcha." It’s cool and fun, but also not totally accurate; it told me that a burger place that has been in my neighborhood for a year had "opened last month."