How to Get an Automatic Itinerary Without Connecting Your Email

There are two ways a travel app can turn your bookings into an itinerary, and the difference matters more than most people realise when they tap through the setup screen.

The first way is to connect to your mailbox. You grant read access to your email account, the app scans for anything that looks like a booking, and your trips appear on their own. It is genuinely convenient. It is also a standing grant: the app can read what arrives tomorrow, and next month, and the following year, whether or not it has anything to do with travel.

The second way is to send the app only what you want it to see. That is how Petrel works today.

What "you send it" actually means

You forward a confirmation email to your trip address, or you upload the file. A PDF from the airline, a screenshot of a hotel booking, a photo of a paper voucher, or a folder of fourteen of them at once. Petrel reads what you hand it and builds the day-by-day plan. It is not connected to your mailbox, so nothing else reaches it.

The practical consequence is that the boundary is visible. If you want a trip in Petrel, you send four emails. If you stop sending, nothing new arrives. There is no background process you need to remember to turn off, and no question about what happened to the message from your accountant that landed in the same inbox.

The honest trade-off

Inbox connection is more convenient, and pretending otherwise would be silly. A connected app catches the hotel booking you forgot to forward. It picks up the airline's schedule-change email while you are asleep. Forwarding puts that work on you, and some of the time you will forget.

What you get back is a much smaller surface. The app sees four emails instead of forty thousand, and you chose all four.

Which trade is right depends on the person. Plenty of travellers would rather grant access once and never think about it again, and that is a reasonable call. This post is for the other group, who look at that permission screen and would rather not.

Does forwarding actually work well enough?

This is the fair objection. Forwarding is only worth it if the result is as good.

The part that surprises people is that forwarding handles more formats, not fewer. A mailbox scan can only read what arrives as email. Half of travel does not: the ferry ticket someone screenshots and sends you on WhatsApp, the tour voucher printed at a desk, the confirmation buried in a PDF attachment your mail client will not preview. Anything you can put in front of Petrel works, because the input is a file rather than a message in a folder.

The second part is the group trip. Four people book four different pieces and each has a different inbox. No amount of mailbox access solves that, because it is not your mail. Forwarding does, because everyone forwards into the same trip.

How to try it without deciding anything

Your first trip on Petrel is free, with no account and no credit card. Forward a confirmation, upload a PDF, or drop in a folder of screenshots, and see what comes out the other side. If it is not better than what you have, you have lost one email.