How to keep track of a multi-stop Southeast Asia trip

A two-week trip through Southeast Asia rarely comes from one booking source. You might book flights on AirAsia and Scoot, hotels on Agoda, a bus on 12Go Asia, a ferry through a local operator's website, and a night train directly through Thai Railways. The confirmations arrive in different formats, different languages, some as PDFs, some as SMS forwarded to email, one as a QR code in a Thai-language message.

By the time the trip starts, you have a full inbox and a rough sense of where you're going. What you don't have is clarity on whether it all connects — whether there are nights with no hotel, or a checkout time that doesn't give you enough time to reach the bus station.

Why Southeast Asia bookings are harder to organise than European ones

In Europe or North America, most bookings come through a handful of large platforms — Booking.com, Expedia, a major airline — and the confirmation format is predictable. Travel apps that parse confirmations are built around these formats.

Southeast Asia works differently. The accommodation ecosystem is heavily Agoda-weighted, with a mix of local OTAs. Ground transport is fragmented — 12Go, Busbud, direct bus company websites, local ferry operators. Regional airlines like AirAsia, Scoot, and VietJet all have their own confirmation formats. None of these were the target when the major itinerary tools were built.

The result is that confirmations from these providers either fail to parse, import partially, or require manual re-entry. Which means most travellers give up and manage the trip from their inbox.

The gaps that matter

Managing a SEA trip from your inbox creates two failure modes.

The first is the unbooked night. It shows up when you've assumed a night train covers your accommodation but you haven't confirmed the departure time, or when a hotel checkout is the day before your flight and you haven't thought through where you're sleeping. These are easy to miss individually and obvious the moment you see the full trip laid out chronologically.

The second is the tight connection — usually between a bus or ferry arrival and a flight departure. Southeast Asian ground transport runs on approximate schedules. If your bus from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh is scheduled to arrive at 14:00 and your flight is at 16:30, that is technically makeable. It is also the kind of thing that goes wrong. Seeing it flagged before you travel gives you the option to adjust.

What a Bangkok–India–Australia trip actually looks like in practice

As a worked example: a recent trip went Bangkok → Hong Kong → Delhi → Jaipur (by train) → Agra → Delhi → Melbourne. Bookings came from Thai Airways, Cathay Pacific, IndiGo, IRCTC (Indian Railways), Agoda (three hotels), a guesthouse that sent a handwritten-style email confirmation, and Qantas.

Pasting each confirmation took about 15 minutes in total. The timeline came back correctly ordered — arrival in Bangkok, hotel, departure to Hong Kong, layover, Delhi arrival, hotel, train to Jaipur, hotel, train back, guesthouse, flight to Melbourne. The IRCTC confirmation, which is dense with Indian Railways-specific abbreviations, parsed correctly. The guesthouse email, which was informal and contained no standard formatting, also parsed correctly.

The gap detector flagged one thing: the checkout time at the Delhi hotel before the Qantas flight was earlier than expected and the airport was 45 minutes away. A pre-booked transfer made more sense than hoping for a cab. That flag was useful.

Providers that are supported

Travel Sane uses a language model rather than templates, so it reads whatever you paste without needing a provider-specific parser. In practice, the following all work:

• Agoda hotel confirmations (English and localised versions)
• AirAsia, Scoot, VietJet, and other regional airline confirmations
• 12Go Asia bus and ferry bookings
• IRCTC / Indian Railways confirmations
• Thai Railways e-tickets
• Trip.com hotel and transport confirmations
• Booking.com and Hostelworld confirmations
• Informal guesthouse and homestay email confirmations
• Confirmations in Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese, Hindi, and other non-Latin scripts

Related: How to read an IRCTC booking confirmation · TripIt alternative for Agoda and Indian Railways