Sortie vs TripIt: Planning the Trip vs Organising What You Book

Choose Sortie if you are still building the trip: deciding where to go, saving places, arranging realistic days and keeping a multi-city route coherent. Choose TripIt if the trip is largely booked and your main problem is collecting flights, hotels, rental cars, trains and confirmation details into one dependable itinerary.

TripIt has spent years refining a wonderfully specific workflow. Forward confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com, or use Inbox Sync, and the service turns bookings into a structured itinerary. Flights, hotels, rental cars, trains, shuttles, cruises and many event reservations can all live together with dates, times and confirmation numbers.

The free product already covers the organisational basics: travel plans in one place, access across devices, calendar sync, sharing, transport options, nearby places, airport and terminal maps, travel statistics and limited document uploads.

TripIt Pro costs US$49 per year and pushes further into travel operations. Current official features include real-time flight alerts, fare-refund monitoring, better-seat assistance and alternate-flight help. That is a different kind of value from a sightseeing planner. When a flight changes at the airport, an elegant list of museums is not the thing you need.

• Confirmation-email organisation
• Flight and hotel logistics
• Calendar sync
• Travel information across devices
• Airport and terminal context
• Real-time flight disruption support on Pro
• Useful for frequent and business travellers

Sortie is strongest before TripIt's core workflow begins. You might know you are going to Spain but still be deciding whether Madrid gets three nights or four, whether Córdoba is an overnight or a stop between Seville and Granada, and which forty saved places actually belong in the itinerary.

Collections hold research before you commit it to a day. The trip structure keeps destinations, hotels, travel handoffs and daily plans connected. You can move places and reshape the itinerary without treating every edit as a spreadsheet repair job.

That makes Sortie more useful for leisure travellers who enjoy the planning process, especially on longer or multi-city trips. It is not trying to beat TripIt at flight disruption alerts; it is trying to make sure the trip you booked was well designed in the first place.

Think of a trip as having two broad phases. Before booking, you are making decisions: destinations, route, duration, neighbourhoods, places, pace. After booking, you are managing commitments: flight numbers, check-in times, confirmation codes, terminals and changes.

Sortie sits primarily on the first side of that line. TripIt sits primarily on the second. Both can hold itinerary information, which is why they look comparable in an app-store category, but the user's job is different.

For many serious travellers the best answer may even be both: build the trip in a planning-first tool, then use a specialist like TripIt if flight and booking logistics justify another app.

Sortie is better for designing it. Multi-segment planning is a Pro capability, and the product treats destinations, hotel changes and travel days as explicit parts of the itinerary. That helps when the order and duration of cities are still moving.

TripIt is better for keeping the booked version operational. Once the trains, flights and hotels are confirmed, TripIt can collect those reservations into one chronological itinerary and help you access the details across devices.

TripIt. Its free and Pro features are built around the reality of booked travel, and Pro's real-time flight alerts, fare monitoring and alternate-flight assistance are directly useful to someone who flies often.

Sortie can still plan a complex leisure route, but it is not a flight-operations product and should not pretend to be one.

Sortie. The product is designed to collect places, keep them unassigned until you are ready, and then move them into specific days inside a broader trip structure. TripIt can hold manually added plans, notes and places, but sightseeing discovery and itinerary shaping are not where it differentiates.

TripIt's core product is free. TripIt Pro is currently US$49 per year according to its official pricing page.

Sortie Free covers one active trip up to 14 days with single-segment planning, manual editing and public destination and itinerary browsing. Sortie Pro unlocks multiple active trips, longer itineraries, multi-segment planning, export and higher limits. Current annual pricing is £39, US$49, €45 or A$75 depending on market.

The similar US annual price should not distract from the bigger point: the products sell different capabilities. Pay TripIt for deeper travel operations. Pay Sortie when the complexity is in planning the trip itself.

TripIt is the stronger travel organiser. Its confirmation-email workflow and flight-oriented Pro tools are mature, focused and genuinely useful.

Sortie is the stronger choice when the itinerary is still an open problem. It is built to help you decide what the trip should be, organise research into days and keep a longer route understandable while it changes.

If you are choosing between them, ask one question: am I designing the trip, or managing the trip I already booked? That usually gives you the answer immediately.