I finally found the perfect trip planner app.

After 4 years of trial and error, Wanderlog is a breath of fresh and beautiful air

Planning a vacation is best after actually going on vacation. I love opening hundreds of tabs, reading dozens of to-do listicles, favorite fun and bizarre things to do, and setting up a half-rigid itinerary of planned activities with room for them. whims on the spot.

What I don’t like is that there’s no way to tie all of this research together. Chrome Bookmarks, Keep Notes, Gmail, and Maps Lists are only limited in scope, I always end up going back and forth between them, struggling with this fragmented approach. Then a few weeks ago I stumbled across Wanderlog and let me tell you one thing: if I were to create my ideal trip planning app from scratch, it would be very close to Wanderlog. To find a route nothing like route maps.

Actually no, cross that out, I would build something similar but I would forget to think about at least a dozen awesome additional features that the service already offers. Discover route maps.

The basics

First thing: Wanderlog is free and has no advertising (this is its privacy policy). It’s available on Android, iOS, and the web, so I can start planning on my computer, continue on my iPad, study on my Pixel, and jump between all platforms without a hitch. It also allows you to share travel plans with your friends or partners with view or edit rights only, and it updates live when someone makes a change, a la Google Docs. It’s also a smooth app, with neat animations, nice iconography and typography, and a few layers and gestures.

These are my most basic requirements for a travel app, and believe it or not, a lot of the services I’ve tried before didn’t meet all of these boxes. Either sharing was impossible, or they didn’t have web or iOS clients, and those that did either showed more ads than a Google Discover feed or had an outdated user interface. Beyond those requirements, the app has almost everything I wanted in a trip, trip and route planner… and more. Let me guide you.

The trip

First, I create a trip. It could be something specific like my weekend spent in Reims with exact start and end times, or a vague plan like a general list of things I want to do in France. Once my trip has been created, Wanderlog opens three tabs for me: Overview, Itinerary and Explore.

Are a little unorthodox and let’s start with the last one. You know these listicles of 10 things to see in [nom de la ville] that every travel blog has? Wanderlog aggregates a few (for larger cities), but it goes the extra mile by parsing the list and finding the places on a map for me. Spirit. Soufflé. Upset. No more copying and pasting foreign names of places, no more having to go back and forth between each article and Google Maps to find out if a place can fit my schedule.

Each place has a photo, tags, a short description and Google Maps details (star rating, opening hours, website, phone number). I can immediately see if it is open on Sundays or go to its site, add it to my trip in general or to a specific route day, view it on the map or get directions to get there.

I know I’ll always do my own research later and find other unique and less generic places to visit, but these crawled listings are one way fantastic foolproof to start planning any trip.

Now back to the first tab. Here, I can plug in my reservations: flight, accommodation, and rental cars. These can be imported automatically from Gmail (which I honestly wouldn’t recommend – don’t let any app read all of your emails, period) or manually forwarded from your mailbox (better).

You can also type in the details by hand if you prefer that. When it comes to accommodation, Wanderlog can also research Airbnb and Hotels.com for you, which will also help you plan your stay. However, there is no search for flights or cars. If I had to make a change to Wanderlog it would be to add support for importing train / bus reservations. These travel methods are widely used here in Europe and it would be nice to have them fully integrated into the app.

Underneath there is a box for personal notes. It can be whatever I want, and like all noteboxes in the app, it supports formatting with bold, italics, underline, bullets, and numbered lists. On the web, you can also indent and add links.

Then we come to the lists. The things I saved from the Explore tab show up here, but I can also make more lists and manually type in the place names. The data comes from Google Maps, so everything you can find there is available here. In my experience, only a few characters are needed to locate any location, and Wanderlog is smart enough to search the city you’re looking at instead of the whole world.

I could spend hours lyrical about the power of these lists, but let’s boil it down to a few things: short, pre-populated descriptions, data from Google Maps, custom photos, personal notes (with all the formatting), links to search on Google, Trip Advisor and Maps. But most importantly, the icons of the lists can be personalized, so that I can have a green mountain for the lists of parks and outdoor places, then a blue shopping bag for the stores, and a red mug for the cafes.

Compared to Google Maps, which gives a blue icon for everything, this visual differentiation makes Wanderlog so, so, so much better.