One missed confirmation can unravel an entire family vacation.
There are four travelers, which equates to four boarding passes, two hotel confirmations, a car rental reference number, and a theme park reservation buried deep in an email inbox you probably have not checked since Tuesday. Coordinating family trip bookings among several different emails and devices is more frustrating than simply being unable to find documents you swear you saved.
By the end of this post, you’ll know exactly how to set up and use TripIt for your next family trip so every booking is in one place, accessible by everyone, and impossible to lose.
This is practical and tested. No theory.
What TripIt Actually Does and Why Families Need It
Do you recall spending twenty minutes looking for your hotel confirmation in your email while your children fought in the back seat?
TripIt — not a spreadsheet, not a note-taking application — was developed specifically to solve this exact problem. You send a copy of your booking confirmation email(s) to plans@tripit.com. TripIt reads them, identifies the key data points, organizes the information based on date and time, and creates a comprehensive itinerary that includes flights, hotels, car rentals, and dining reservations (all of the above, in one location).
Family travel of four presents additional challenges than do individual trips. When traveling with a family of four, you manage more bookings, more travelers, and more moving parts. The biggest benefit of using TripIt is its ability to detect conflicts. Example: If your car rental pick-up time is 9 AM, but your arrival flight time is 11 AM, TripIt alerts you prior to you standing at a rental counter with no confirmed reservation.
No spreadsheets. No folders. No last-minute panic.
Setting Up TripIt in Under Five Minutes
Is there any good reason why your next family vacation should begin with an email inbox search? There is none, and setting up the TripIt service takes less time than finding a parking space at the airport.
Download the TripIt mobile application from either the App Store or Google Play and create a free account using your email address. After creating your free account, sign in to your account and then connect your email account. Both Gmail and Outlook allow you to easily link your email accounts to TripIt.
TripIt receives permission to read all of the confirmation emails associated with your account. From that point forward, whenever a new confirmation email arrives in your inbox, TripIt automatically pulls the relevant information and places it in your itinerary.
If you would prefer not to provide TripIt with access to your entire inbox, you can choose not to connect your email account. Instead, manually forward any confirmation email to plans@tripit.com via your registered account. In most cases, TripIt will process your forwarded confirmation email within minutes.
That’s it.
How to Add Your Family’s Bookings to TripIt
How you get bookings into TripIt depends on where they came from, and there are three methods worth knowing.
First, you will have an automatic import of your bookings. When you connect your email, TripIt automatically scans for confirmation emails, pulls them out, and adds them to your itinerary for you. This method works well for flights, hotels, and car rentals made through big players.
Second, you’ll manually send confirmations via email. Any booking that TripIt doesn’t find automatically, just forward the confirmation to plans@tripit.com. Forward it. Forget it. Find it when you need it.
Third, you can enter bookings by hand. Some things don’t come with a confirmation email, such as ferry tickets, theme park reservations, etc., and these types of activities can be added by hand within the app. This is also the place to add your kid’s school vacation dates as a manual reminder to show your entire travel period in one view, along with your bookings.
After you’ve got your itinerary together, you’ll want to share it with your family. All parties will download TripIt, and then you will invite each party member to the trip; everybody will then see the same itinerary on their own device. No more “send me the hotel address” at 11 p.m.
Every booking. One place. Done.
The TripIt Features Families Actually Use
Most apps come loaded with features nobody touches. These four are the ones that genuinely make a difference for families.
Master itinerary view: Everything you and/or your family have booked is shown in chronological order. Open the app, and you’re looking at today’s plan, when the plane leaves, which terminal it leaves from, where the hotel is located, and what’s next. No more jumping between different apps or emails.
Conflict detection: TripIt will identify booking conflicts (e.g., checking out of your hotel before your return flight departs or renting a car from one airport while connecting through another). Families traveling with many travelers and tight connections appreciate being able to catch these issues before they travel. That’s precisely why this application exists.
Offline access: Without a cellular connection, your itinerary is still available. For families going abroad where roaming fees are a legitimate concern, this feature is more important than any other feature listed here. Get your itinerary downloaded at home prior to leaving, and you have everything you need, no matter the level of connectivity.
Map integration: The hotel is shown relative to the airport, the restaurant is shown relative to the hotel, etc. Great for families visiting foreign cities with kids who may be concerned about how long a walk is before complaining about it.
Worth knowing before your next trip.
Free vs TripIt Pro — Is the Upgrade Worth It for Families?
Free TripIt contains all of the items above: automatic import, sending confirmations via email manually, shared itineraries, conflict detection, and offline access. For most families traveling 1-2 times annually, free should provide enough coverage.
TripIt Pro ($49/year) adds real-time flight alerts, notifications regarding potential seat upgrades, and a rewards/points/miles tracker. If your family travels three+ times per year, the flight alerts alone are worth the cost. A 40-minute warning before boarding due to a gate change while traveling with two children is worth way more than $49.
Honest answer: Try the free option first. Upgrade once your family is clearly traveling often enough.
TripIt Removes the Admin. You Handle the Fun.
TripIt does not plan your vacation. Instead, it removes all of the obstacles that interfere with you enjoying yourself. Connect your email account, set it up once, and let it organize all of your information.
If you want to build a complete family travel toolkit around TripIt, the best family trip planning apps post covers the other apps that work alongside it, including budget tracking, flight search, and packing lists. And if you haven’t locked in your flights yet, read the best day to book family flights before you search, as timing makes a real difference in price.
Download the app. Forward your first confirmation. See what organized actually feels like.
