Tripsy LLC | Free or $40/£30 yearly for Pro
- Map-based travel itinerary planner
- Powerful expense, distance, and travel tracking
- Some finicky UI elements
Tripsy is a long-running travel app that’s just entered version 3.0, which apparently represents the developer’s “most significant update in nearly five years”. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to take a closer look.
It takes the familiar form of a travel app that helps you to build an itinerary, adding in restaurants, lodging details, and points of interest. Locating and saving a location will be familiar to anyone who’s used Apple Maps or Google Maps before (so basically everyone), while a new feature lets you get a neat overview of your itinerary on a map screen.
The new look is crisp and familiar
There’s also the facility to sort activities according to their proximity to your hotel, which is a neat feature.
You can add prices for all of your activities, allowing you to keep tabs on how much you’re spending across your trip. Travel times can also be tracked, and it’s possible to forward any reservations from your email and have them saved in your itinerary automatically – though the process for doing this doesn’t seem quite as intuitive as you might like it to be.
Itineraries are built around a map
Indeed, I found the whole map-based itinerary building system to be a little flaky. The app didn’t always locate the restaurant, bar, or lodgings that I searched for. This seemed to relate to a finicky data set, with the app attributing a hotel I was staying at to ‘Nightlife’ rather than ‘Lodging’.
I also found the data entry process itself to be fundamentally unsatisfying. In particular, the app’s requirement for you to essentially back out of or close certain data entry screens rather than pressing a definitive ‘Enter’ or ‘Save’ button felt a little odd.
Finding locations can be flaky
Downloading and using the Tripsy app is free, but there is a Pro tier that enables you to sync your calendar and share your itineraries with other people. There’s a 7-day free trial for Tripsy Pro, so it’s worth signing up if you have a short break in the pipeline.
While it’s great being able to plan an itinerary, I also appreciated Tripsy’s ability to log past trips, which can serve as a useful memory aid after the fact. Even here, however, I would have appreciated an extra visual element, perhaps enabling you to implement a carousel of your favourite holiday snaps. As it is, you can upload individual photos as generic documents, without so much as a thumbnail.
Add documents and track expenses
All in all, Tripsy is an undeniably useful travel planning app with some powerful features. However, it doesn’t quite feel sufficiently intuitive, flexible, or comprehensive just yet to be our go to travel app pick. We’re looking forward to what the next update has in store.