Tripsy makes your trip planning smarter, but can come in handy with extra options

For those of you who have ever dreamed of giving up everything, selling your possessions and “hitting the streets” for the rest of your life, you’ve probably spent hours, if not the entire day, scrolling through travelgram (Instagram’s travel feed) or watching movies on YouTube.

I've done this, several times (usually at the expense of my psychological well-being), and one of the many things you tend to do when you can't dream of something but eating jiggly cheesecakes in Osaka, catching a beautiful sunset in front of the Roman Colosseum, or sipping an espresso at that café in Paris that Walt Whitman loved to frequent is to write down the names of cafés, museums, interesting streets, and famous landmarks that you hope to go to in the future.

Now, if you happen to write down these locations, it's most likely in your phone's notepad app or – if you're like me and thousands of others – you 'star' or 'save' these locations on Google Maps. For a long time, Google Maps was my favorite app when it came to pinning places I would love to visit at some point sooner or later, and even places I wanted to go to when I traveled.

Then last year I came across an app called Tripsy , and it has changed the way I organize my trip or save sites and landmarks that I need to visit sooner or later.

Tripsy has a 4.7 out of 5 star rating on the App Store, which is the only platform it is available on. Options on the Google Play Store include Wanderlog, TripIt, and Lambus, which almost has a similar interface to Tripsy.

The free version of the app lets you do almost everything you'd expect from a travel planning app. The paid model gives you access to ready-made itineraries that you can customize to your liking. But if you're a DIY traveler, the free version is more than enough.

What the app does

For trip planning purposes, consider Tripsy to be Google Maps on steroids.

The app allows you to bookmark all the places you want or want to visit during your trip, such as cafes, restaurants, museums, bars, events, shopping places, theaters, train/bus/ferry stations, car rental kiosks, health clinics, among others. It allows you to plan your Google Maps more efficiently.

The 'map view' option reveals all the parts you have marked, also according to the class they belong to.

Now, these areas that you bookmark could be for a bucket list country or city that you simply want to visit sooner or later or a place that you are actually traveling to.

If your trip is confirmed, you can store your airline tickets, present confirmation vouchers, pre-purchased museum/tourist tickets, access receipts, etc., in organized folders in the app so that all your information is quickly accessible. Tripsy may remove these reservations from your inbox if you allow it, or you may simply forward these emails to your private Tripsy inbox.

If you have a time-sensitive action to do, such as visiting a selected restaurant that might close early or a walking tour that starts at 11am, you can set it up right away in the app and ask it to remind you an hour or two ahead of time.

To get started, click the plus sign in the top right corner, enter the name of your trip, the dates (if you don't have confirmed dates, the app will automatically put 'someday' in the field), and the time zone you're most likely to be in while traveling. From there, you'll arrive at your all-important trip overview page, where you can start mapping out your journey.

The free template means you can only create 5 travel itineraries.

One of the many standout features of the app is its easy compatibility with third-party apps, most notably Google Maps. If you want to pin or write down a place to visit, you don't even need to open the Tripsy app – you can simply 'pin' any location to your regular Google Maps and then ask to share that information with Tripsy (the app has a handy tutorial that can help you through this process).

If you don't need to hold Tripsy open, or are more comfortable with Google and even Apple Maps but still need Tripsy's advanced ranking features, you can immediately use the platforms and then 'share' the knowledge with Tripsy.

You can even add friends and family to each 'trip' you take and give them input to add or remove items from your itinerary – but this feature is almost non-existent with the premium subscription.

Verdict

Tripsy is everything you need in a travel app.

The map categorization feature is incredibly useful and has helped me plan more effectively. For those in a specific area of a metropolis, like Shibuya in Tokyo, for example, activating the Tripsy map gives you a quick overview of what you plan to do in the area, such as shopping, visiting museums, or grabbing a bite to eat at a popular restaurant.

Pinning areas that catch my eye, cafes, resorts and so on, I need to go to has often helped me decide my next holiday destination – my rule of thumb is that if I have more than 30 pins in a field, (and the flight tickets are cheap), that’s where I’ll go next.

However, there are a few things the app could do better.

I want Tripsy to add some really useful places to visit as you start putting together an itinerary, at least known, must-see landmarks like the Eiffel Tower or the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Auto-populating these landmarks into the app would save a lot of time.

The map contained in the application does not display the areas correctly in any aspect while you try to search for new ones. Even popular travel landmarks like the Lotte World Tower in Seoul or the Sensoji Temple in Tokyo didn't show up on the app's map, which was really annoying until I discovered the workaround that pins these areas via Google Maps. The app should digitize your maps, especially considering it is the simplest but most necessary service of the app.

Tracking funds and expenses is a crucial feature that the app lacks. Tripsy's competitor Wanderlog features this, and actually does it in a pretty good way too.

Additional options like 'opening hours' for pinned locations, the ability to click photos and store them in the app so it turns into a travel log of sorts, and generally seeing additional details about pinned locations would have been helpful and provided a much more premium experience.

To be sure, if Google Maps ever releases a hyper-categorization feature where you can tag and categorize areas based on what they are (e.g., a restaurant, cafe, museum, store, and so on), without having to do so in Google MyMaps, I would happily miss out on that.

However, until that happens, Tripsy will stay on my phone.