TripIt: The Best Travel App (To Replace TripCase)

For the past 12 years I used TripCase to organize my travel plans. When I retired in 2020 and became a full-time nomad, TripCase was the only reason I wasn’t lost in the wilderness given all of the things I needed to juggle in order to have a smooth experience moving around the globe every month.

But because all good things must end, TripCase is sunsetting and closing its app on April 1, 2025, so it’s time to say goodbye to the most helpful app I use that’s also been in my life the longest. You will be missed TripCase.

But it’s not all sad news. This means that I get to explore other apps out there that I never considered because TripCase beat them all in my opinion. I get to see what improvements they have been made and which one will be graced with my travel fiend presence going forward 🙂 . So let’s get into it!

After hearing that TripCase was closing via an email their team sent to everyone on February 12, 2025, I started my search for a new app. First I asked all my Insta followers what apps they used and made a list. The overwhelming majority used two different apps: TripIt or Wanderlog.

I had never heard of Wanderlog and had tried using TripIt a few years ago, but had found it lacking next to TripCase. So I was excited to test it again as well as this new-to-me app, Wanderlog.

Just to make sure I was being thorough, I also did some research to see what the general internet recommended as the best travel aggregator apps and I didn’t see any other ones that looked like a better fit for me than TripIt and Wanderlog, so I decided to proceed with thoroughly testing those two for a month.

But first, for those that aren’t familiar with TripCase, let’s get into what it was and why I loved it so much to show what I’m looking for in a new app.

TripCase

TripCase was the main reason I seemed to be on top of my constant travel plans. I loved it because all I had to do was forward any confirmation email I had from an airline, hotel, train, anything, and they automatically compiled it into an itinerary and then alerted me to any flight changes on that route.

For example, years ago my Mom and I were flying to Fiji and the airline ended up delaying our flight 12 hours. The first time I heard about the delay was from TripCase – not the airline. That heads up allowed us to plan accordingly and I’ll never forget it.

Especially for something like my European itinerary to visit my friends in my 20s where I only stayed in each city 2-4 days, knowing what was up in an organized fashion was necessary and TripCase allowed me to do that years ago and still did to this day.

PROs

These were the pros of TripCase in my mind:

Organization: Obviously this is the main purpose of this app and it did it so well. I could email basically anything to “trips@tripcase.com” and it was added to my travel itinerary. This made it really easy to juggle all of the balls I do to manage full-time travel seamlessly.

I had all of my dates, times and confirmation numbers organized in one place automatically and it helped me double check that I had lodging every night, which is especially difficult with big time zone differences and the international date line making it confusing 🙂 .

Alerts: These were HUGE! As I mentioned, TripCase routinely alerted me to more accurate information faster than the actual airline I was flying. This has led to it helping me save a lot of time by telling me about a gate change or flight delay way before the airline did so I could plan accordingly. I don’t know how they did this – it was like magic.

Design: The design of TripCase was completely no nonsense, which I preferred to more busy but not necessarily more visually appealing apps. Its simple design made it really easy to see the information I needed quickly while on the go.

CONs

But like everything, TripCase did have it’s downsides:

Glitches: At times TripCase would just stop working 🙂 . Luckily this was super rare and never happened when I was actively traveling that I noticed, but there wasn’t an alert anywhere that the app was down for maintenance or anything. It would just stop working for a little bit without explanation.

Incorrect Dates: There was one part of forwarding emails to TripCase that wasn’t seamless, but it might have been my fault for planning trips so far in advance 😉 . At times when I forwarded an email to TripCase for a far off date that was almost a year in the future, it would create a trip with a past year date instead of a future one and not allow me to change it to the correct date until we got closer to that time. So the app seemed to have a limitation for how far in advance you can add travel details and it was less than a year.

Wanderlog

Those are the things I loved and found challenging about TripCase. Now let’s dive into a new-to-me app and see how it measures up!

PROs

Design: I really like Wanderlog’s design overall – it’s colorful with lots of pictures, icons and maps, which looks lovely on a desktop.

Expenses: As a finance blogger (supposedly 😉 ), I love that Wanderlog also imports the expenses from your confirmation emails to log how much you paid for your travels. However, there’s a big con to this that makes it less useful if I don’t always travel alone that I’ll talk about in the cons section below.

Holidays: Wanderlog has a pop up for individual trips if my travel plans include going to a country during a local holiday they celebrate, which is very helpful! I’ve started adding individual countries’ holiday calendars to my Google Calendar, but this pop up is more way convenient.

Email Attachments: You can click on the paperclip symbol to the right of items and it pops up the actual email you forwarded to Wanderlog, which I love! It’s really nice to have that readily accessible and I haven’t seen that option before unless you upload the email as a PDF separately.

CONs

New Email Address For Every Trip: This is unfortunately a dealbreaker for me. Each trip in Wanderlog requires that you forward your travel confirmations to a DIFFERENT EMAIL ADDRESS. Instead of having one address and being able to easily forward all of your confirmations to an easy to remember email, Wanderlog makes me go into their website, create a trip and then copy a unique (and confusingly long) email address to use for that specific trip.

It’s super annoying especially since I’m planning multiple trips at once and then have to keep double checking which email address is which. It was also very annoying and time consuming to transfer all of my confirmation emails to Wanderlog compared to TripIt because of this ‘feature’ that I think is more of a bug.

No Offline Mode: This is another dealbreaker for me. Wanderlog isn’t available offline unless you pay for their Pro version, which in my mind basically makes this app unusable because when I’m traveling is the only time I’m offline. If I’m on a plane without wifi and can’t check my upcoming travel plans – what are we even doing here?

And even if you have the Pro version you have to individually press “Download” on each of your travel plans before going offline. I think this should just happen automatically.

No Check In/Out Times: Wanderlog doesn’t easily list check in and check out times like TripCase or TripIt, which is crucial information in my mind. However, I couldn’t even find a way to add them myself. That’s a strange exclusion in a travel app.

No Split Expenses: Expanding on my appreciation for Wanderlog keeping track of expenses from confirmation emails, they don’t allow you to split expenses for a trip you’re not taking alone unless you add a person to your Wanderlog, bringing them into the ecosystem and letting them see all of your travel plans. So while it’s nice to be able to see everything I spent, it’s not that helpful since I can’t see what I’m actually paying myself if I’m splitting expenses as I often do with my Partner or Mom or both.

No Time Zones: One thing that’s super important when planning international travel is time zones! Knowing what time zone your flight leaves from, lands in and how your check in time translates in all of that is crucial. And Wanderlog doesn’t show any of that 🙂 . There is no time zone information on this website – and I find that very unfortunate.

Challenging Itinerary Visuals: The layout of the itineraries in Wanderlog doesn’t work well for one of the main functions I use these travel aggregators for: Doubling checking that I have somewhere to sleep each night. I can only see a summary itinerary or a longform one – neither of which make it easy for me to scan and confirm I know where I’m sleeping each night.

In contrast, TripCase and TripIt show itineraries in an overlapping by day format so I can see if there’s a gap where I don’t have an Airbnb booked for example. This is obviously specific to me and how I use these apps, but it’s one of the main reasons I use these kinds of apps and it’s a dealbreaker for me.

Pushy Pop Ups & Emails: Wanderlog is also quite spammy. It seems like every time I log in, the first thing I’m shown is an annoying pop up telling me to buy their Pro product even after I disabled notifications from them.

Before I did that, they were sending me notifications every 5 seconds. They were also emailing me constantly about a trip I had just started planning to try and push their other services – leave me alone!

Cluttered Homepage: On the design side, while I do love how colorful and image-filled the individual trip pages are, the homepage is way too busy – so much so that I can’t find my actual trips easily amongst all of the things they’re trying to push me towards, such as excursions and booking lodging through them.

As an extension of this, if I’m in a specific trip on mobile and leave the app, when I return I’m dropped back on the homepage, which makes it difficult to use this app while traveling and trying to input or find information quickly while switching between multiple apps.

AI Trip Planner: This is a personal gripe, but Wanderlog is trying to push an AI trip planner, which like most AI I’ve seen, is trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. I don’t want or trust an AI to recommend places IRL for me to visit based on skimming the internet. I get recommendations directly from people who have actually been there.

TripIt

So that was a lot 🙂 . Currently Wanderlog seems to have more cons than pros based on how I use these kinds of apps. Let’s see if TripIt can fill those gaps.

PROs

One Email: Oh thank goodness 🙂 . Just like TripCase, TripIt gives you one email to send all of your confirmations to: “plans@tripit.com.” It then sends you an email when it’s been imported just like TripCase.

Offline Availability: TripIt is available offline with their free version – what a novel concept 🙂 .

At-A-Glance: This app has had a redesign since I originally tried it a year ago and it’s great at showing all of the info you need upfront on mobile and on desktop. It’s even clear with time zones on the summary page and you can click through for more details on the go.

Check In/Out Times: TripIt shows check in and out times without me having to do anything.

Trip Picture: One thing that often tripped up TripCase was how they pulled photos of my destination. At times it was blank because it got confused with the location, but so far with TripIt, that hasn’t been a problem even with the 12 months of travel itineraries.

Additional Features: TripIt has features that I haven’t seen on TripCase or Wanderlog that I appreciate such as: Neighborhood Safety Scores based on your accommodation address, the option to view nearby restaurants, hospitals, cafes etc based on the same info and even road trip help. TripIt also shows a map of your activities if you click on the notebook in the mobile app, which I did see as an feature on Wanderlog as well.

CONs

Design Nitpicks: The overall design of TripIt is very minimal. It’s less ugly than it was a year ago, but compared to the overall colorful and eye-catching Wanderlog – it’s not very pretty 🙂 . However, TripIt seems to have further changed the website since I re-joined a month ago to make it worse.

In February you could see everything you needed on one screen, but now you have to click to see Booking Info and Notes, which is annoying and less efficient than the previous layout they had last month where everything was easily seen on one page. Luckily all of the important info is still all on one page in the mobile app except for notes, which likely were always behind a click.

Unnecessary Clicks: Editing trips in the mobile app has many extra unnecessary steps compared to doing the same actions on desktop, which I found a little frustrating.

Past Trips: You can’t merge past trips, so when I tried to transfer my decade of trips I had saved in TripCase to TripIt, there isn’t a way to easily do that and archive my past adventures. This would have just been a nice-to-have feature though.

TripIt VS Wanderlog

So that was an exploration of what these apps have to offer, but my final test was using them head-to-head for a month. During that trial period I realized that I had a question about an upcoming travel plan, so I opened both websites to see how they helped me answer that question.

I used Wanderlog first and realized that the email I sent with my connecting flight information was categorized as one flight without a connection, which is incorrect and as a result only had one of my flight numbers, which didn’t help me answer my travel question.

Then I went to TripIt and it had all of my information inputted correctly from the exact same emails AND TripIt helped me quickly see the information I needed, such as my flight numbers, departure times and importantly, what time zone that departure and arrival time were in.

Then I clicked in and it had the flight duration – so I found literally everything I needed. Wanderlog by comparison had nothing but 1 of 2 flight numbers and my overall departure and arrival times, but no time zones, durations or what I needed to make a quick travel decision. So Wanderlog was officially out.

The Winner: TripIt!

Obviously this is a surprise to no one that read the title of this post, but I wanted to walk you through my thought process. Wanderlog has a pretty interface, but I prefer function over flash. TripIt has all of the features I need and most of the features I loved about TripCase.

Conclusion

So that was my experience trying to find the best replacement for the travel organization app TripCase. It was a great 12 years, but it’s time to move on and I’m hopeful that TripIt will help me keep my plans organized as I continue my full-time nomad lifestyle.