TripIt has been the default trip organizer since 2007. Its strengths and its blind spots are both that old.

We use TripIt. It works. For Delta confirmations, Marriott bookings, Hertz pickups, the major Western chains, it does what it has always done, which is forward an email to plans@tripit.com and get back a clean itinerary in seconds.

That covers maybe sixty percent of the bookings most American business travelers ever make. If that's the shape of your travel, this page probably isn't for you. Stay where you are.

The other forty percent is where this page starts. Agoda hotels in Vietnam. Trip.com flights inside China. IRCTC train tickets in India. A guesthouse in Tbilisi that emails you a confirmation in Georgian. A ferry ticket from a Croatian operator's website that comes as a PDF with no booking metadata. These don't parse reliably in TripIt. We've tried. They come back as failures, or they come back wrong, or they come back missing fields you actually need.

Travel Sane was built for that forty percent.

What TripIt is genuinely good at

The email forwarding mechanic is great. Nineteen years of refinement on the major airline and chain hotel templates means most of what an average US business traveler books goes in cleanly. The mobile app is mature. Real-time flight alerts on the Pro tier do what they say. The free tier is generous. The brand is trusted because it's older than the iPhone.

If your travel is mostly the providers TripIt knew about when it launched, the case for switching is weak. We are not going to argue otherwise.

Where it stops working

The pattern is consistent. Confirmations from booking platforms outside the original Western set tend to come back broken. Agoda is the most common complaint we hear. Trip.com is second. Indian Railways third. After that it's a long tail of regional providers, direct hotel emails, and anything in a non-Latin script.

The other thing TripIt doesn't do, and never has, is tell you what's missing. It shows you what you've booked. If you forgot to reserve a hotel for the night of May 6th in Delhi, or your connection at Hong Kong is 35 minutes when it needs to be 90, you find out the day of. We built Travel Sane partly because that kept happening to us.

What we built differently

Travel Sane uses a language model to extract structured data from any booking confirmation, in any language, in any format. Paste the email. Drag in the PDF. Drop a screenshot. The same parser handles all of them, because it's reading the booking the way a person would, not matching it against a known template.

The other piece is gap detection. Once your trip is loaded, Travel Sane scans the timeline and flags problems. Unbooked nights. Connections too tight to make. Missing transfers between legs. Overlapping reservations. The flag appears inline on the timeline next to the booking it's about. Not a popup. Not a notification. Just there, in context, before you leave.

There's also a Gantt view of the whole trip, which most planners in the category don't offer. It shows duration and overlap across the date range visually instead of as a list. Either view exports to PDF if you want a copy to print, file, or send. Every trip also has a shareable link, so the person picking you up at the airport can open the full timeline in a browser without making an account.

The honest comparison

Which one to use

Stay with TripIt if your trips are mostly major airlines and chain hotels and you want a polished native app. It's a fine product for the job it was built for.

Switch to Travel Sane if a meaningful number of your bookings are coming back broken in TripIt, or if missing-hotel and tight-connection flags would have saved you grief on a recent trip. You'll know if this is you.

Use both if you want TripIt's mobile app for the day of travel and Travel Sane to verify the trip is whole before you leave. We don't think this is silly. They're different tools.