Best travel planning apps › App or spreadsheet

Facts checked November 10, 2026

Travel itinerary app or spreadsheet?

Keep a spreadsheet if money is the hard part, your group already lives in a Sheet, or you love the planning. Get a travel itinerary app if you want bookings in one place, a map, and the day offline on your phone. Five days at our plans' pace is about 24 stops, and a sheet looks up none of them.

These numbers are ours, and so is one of the options. Winding AI, Inc. publishes this page and makes Highlights, one of the four choices below, so we have a stake in what you decide. We still send plenty of people to the spreadsheet.

We counted what a trip is made of

We publish 35 ready-made trip plans, and on November 10 we counted what's inside them. They cover 167 days and hold 794 stops, which break down into 446 places, 289 meals and 59 events, along with 84 transport legs and 14 lodging rows. That comes to 4.8 stops a day and 23 a plan.

Now build that as a spreadsheet. Five days at 4.8 stops a day is 24 rows, roughly 13 places, nine meals and two events, plus the two or three transport legs our plans average. Each stop needs two things you have to go and find, the opening hours on the day you'll be there and the walk or drive from the stop before. Twenty-four stops times two is 48 lookups. We haven't timed anyone, but at a brisk minute each that's most of an hour with a map open in the next tab.

An hour is nothing for a trip you've saved up for, and that often settles it. The cost comes later, when something moves. Take one stop off Tuesday, put it on Thursday, and four cells are suddenly wrong: its hours on the new day, the walk to it, the walk from it, and the walk that now closes the gap it left. None of them turn red. The Louvre is closed on Tuesdays and open until 9 p.m. on Wednesdays and Fridays, so the same row is a long evening or a locked door depending on where you drag it.

Counted from the Highlights production database (trips table, ready-made plans) on November 10, 2026.

Three trips where we'd use the spreadsheet

The clearest is a long trip across several countries with a budget to hold. Three months from Lisbon to Bangkok isn't really an itinerary problem. It's visas, dates that slide, and whether Vietnam ate the money meant for Japan, and a sheet lets you add the next column the moment you think of it. Wanderlog does track spending, split bills and convert currency, which is enough for most trips. For the long ones we'd want our own formulas.

The second is a group that already lives in a shared Sheet. If five friends are in one and it's working, leave them there. Google Sheets lets several people edit at the same time, and moving everyone to a new app usually costs more goodwill than it saves.

The third is someone who enjoys this. Some people love an evening with a map and forty tabs, and their sheet beats any draft because every row is a decision they made. We wouldn't talk them out of it. They can have the map too, since Google My Maps imports a Google Sheet as pins, up to 2,000 rows.

Where an app earns its place

Bookings come first. A flight from one site, a room from another and a train from a third leave you hunting through email at the station. Forward those confirmations to plans@tripit.com and you get a single itinerary from TripIt no matter where you booked, and that part is free. A sheet holds only what you typed.

Then the map. A row can't show you that stops three and four sit on opposite sides of the river. Wanderlog keeps the itinerary and the map in one view and estimates the time and distance between places, which is most of that second lookup gone.

Then the day itself, when a spreadsheet turns into a small grid you pinch at on a corner with one bar of signal. Sheets can work offline, but only if you tap Make available offline on the file before you leave. TripIt says your plans are there even when you're offline. Wanderlog is murkier. Its Pro page sells offline access, and its App Store listing says every plan is saved offline anyway, so try it in airplane mode before you fly.

Last, other people. A shared sheet works for friends who open spreadsheets, and you know which of yours don't. In Highlights, our app, they get one link, read the plan in a browser and tap Going, Maybe or Can't go, with no account. They can't edit it, so if everyone should be changing things, Wanderlog's real-time editing is the better fit.

Six questions that settle it

1. Is the budget harder than the schedule? If it is, start with a sheet.
2. Is there already a Sheet your group actually opens? Then stay in it.
3. Did you book on more than two or three different sites? Let TripIt collect them, even if the rest of the trip lives in a sheet.
4. Will you read it on a street corner with bad signal? Then lean toward an app.
5. Are your days likely to move around? Every move is four stale cells.
6. Would you honestly enjoy filling in 24 rows? If you felt tired reading that, let something draft them.

How many of the 48 lookups are still yours

All four cost nothing to start.

So which is the best travel itinerary app?

If you came here about to open a blank spreadsheet, try Wanderlog first. You still choose the stops, but it knows how far apart they are, so it's the closest thing to a spreadsheet that has heard of the outside world. We went through what its free plan leaves out on its own page. If bookings are your whole problem, TripIt is the answer, though it won't plan your Tuesday.

If you'd rather not fill in the rows at all, that's what we built Highlights for. You write a sentence about the trip and Sally, our balloon guide, drafts every day with real places, their hours, and the walk or ride between them on a map. Then you change what you don't like. Planning is free. The ready-made plans we counted run $1 to $5 each, with a few free in the app, and Pro includes them. It doesn't import bookings and has no budget at all, and since friends can't edit either, it's the wrong tool for the first two spreadsheet trips above.

Where to find a free itinerary template

Google keeps a Template Gallery at the top right of the Sheets home screen. It describes its own templates as things like resumes, budgets and order forms, so you may come away with a good budget sheet sooner than an itinerary. Vertex42's free Travel Itinerary Template comes for Excel, Word and Google Sheets. It was built around business trips, down to suggesting you rename the MEETINGS section to ACTIVITIES for a vacation.

The best template we can suggest is one you make yourself in five minutes. Give it one row per stop, about five a day, with columns for the day, the time, the stop, the hours that day, how you get there, the confirmation number and the cost. Meals get their own rows, since they're more than a third of what a trip is made of.

If you still can't decide, do one day

Open a blank sheet tonight and do one day of your trip properly, with the hours for that weekday and the walk between each stop. It's about ten lookups. If you reach the end and want to start the next day, you're a spreadsheet person and you should stay one. If you gave up around lunch, let something else fill in the rows.