Keep All Your Travel Bookings Organized In Your Email With This Tool

There's no overstating how complicated planning trips can be. Unless you hire a travel agent to do all the legwork on your behalf, you'll have to juggle multiple tasks when organizing a trip. Between booking flights and hotels, researching activities, securing car rentals, and shopping for travel insurance, travel planning can be a headache.

And then there are emails. Lots and lots of emails. There's a corresponding email for nearly every booking you make, resulting in digital clutter. Before you know it, your inbox is teeming with order confirmations, flight itineraries, car reservations, and more. While you can always assign labels on them for easier tracking, some emails can fall through the cracks, making retrieval all the more difficult. Luckily, as with everything else, there's an app for that.

While there is a deluge of travel-related apps developed to make planning less of a nightmare, TripIt is one of the standouts. It's specifically created to simplify your itinerary. Instead of having to manually sort through all the confirmations and reservations you have in your inbox, TripIt collates them for you and lays all of them out in a single travel itinerary that's easy to view and follow.

It can be a hassle to have to keep sifting through your inbox every time you need to access a confirmation or booking email. With TripIt, you can do away with manual organization, since the app will do it for you. Each time a confirmation email enters your inbox, may it be from an airline, hotel, or even a restaurant, TripIt will automatically extract the most pertinent information, send it to your phone's calendar, and organize it in a straightforward itinerary that you can refer to throughout your trip. "I book a lot with booking.com and Priceline and once I do, boom — right into my calendar it goes once TripIt receives the confirmation email," noted one user on Reddit.

The itinerary has all the details that are crucial in your journey, like flight times, hotel addresses, and car rental locations. Some users have complained that TripIt occasionally includes non-travel-related booking, but you can dodge that problem by deactivating the automatic import feature and instead, manually forward relevant emails to TripIt's dedicated email instead.

The app is free and downloadable on both iOS and Android devices. For added convenience, you can try the Pro version, which packs additional features like flight delay alerts, seat tracker, and fare monitoring. However, it costs $49 per year, which may be hard to justify if you're on a strict budget. But you can always stick to the free version, which is enough to effectively streamline your travel itineraries.

While having TripIt at your disposal is undoubtedly convenient, you may not be comfortable trusting an app to have access to your email or house your personal information. If you're not keen on relying on an app, a worthy alternative is organizing your travel-related emails and documents using storage services like Google Drive or Dropbox. These platforms allow you to create multiple folders for different categories, giving you free rein to organize hotel bookings, boarding passes, digital copies of passports and IDs, and more the way you want.

What's great about these apps is you can share the folders you create with every member of your party, so all of you can enjoy access to a central hub for your documents. The folders can be downloaded for offline access, too, so in case you travel to an area with spotty internet, you can still pull up the information you need. And once the trip is over, you can make a new folder for everyone to upload their photos to — sharing memories quick and hassle-free.