How to Switch From TripIt or Wanderlog Without Retyping Your Trips

You have decided to leave the trip app you have been using. Maybe the sharing you want sits behind the paid tier, maybe it stopped reading your confirmations properly, maybe the company went quiet. Whatever the reason, you get as far as the export screen and then you stop.

Because there are four trips in there. One of them is in nine days. Rebuilding them by hand means finding every confirmation again, retyping flight numbers, and re-checking hotel addresses, and the whole point of using a trip app was to never do that.

That fear is the single most common reason people stay on a tool they have already decided against. It is also mostly unfounded, because your trips are more portable than they look.

Here is what actually moves when you switch, how to get your trips out of the common apps, what will and will not survive the trip across, and how to check the result before you rely on it.

What actually moves when you switch apps

Almost every trip app can hand you your data in one of three shapes. Knowing which one you have tells you exactly what to expect on the other side.

• A calendar export. An .ics file, or a subscribable calendar feed. This is the most common and the most useful. It carries dates, times, titles, and usually locations, which is the skeleton of an itinerary.
• A spreadsheet. A .csv file with a row per booking. Less common, but very clean when it exists, because the columns are already separated.
• A PDF. Often labeled as a printable itinerary. It looks the least like data and is often the richest, because it usually includes confirmation numbers and addresses that a calendar entry drops.

There is also a fourth route that people forget: the original confirmation emails are still sitting in your inbox. You do not actually need the old app's export at all if you still have what the airline and the hotel sent you.

Getting your trips out, step by step

1. Find the export, and do not trust your memory of where it is

Menus move. Rather than following instructions that go stale, look in three places in the app you are leaving: the trip's own share or print menu, the account or settings screen, and any mention of calendar sync. One of those three almost always produces a file or a feed URL.

In broad terms: TripIt exposes a calendar feed and a per-trip print or PDF view. Wanderlog offers a plan export and a calendar option. Tripsy leans on calendar export. If an app only offers a subscribable feed rather than a download, opening that feed URL in a browser usually downloads the .ics directly.

2. Export everything you still care about, not just the next trip

Do the upcoming trips first, because those are the ones with real stakes. Then decide whether past trips matter to you. Many people find they only want the future, which makes this a five-minute job rather than an afternoon.

3. Bring the file in

In Petrel Voyage, upload the export on the home screen. Calendar files (.ics), spreadsheets (.csv or .tsv), PDFs, and photos all go in the same place, and you can drop several at once.

One detail worth knowing, because it trips people up: you can also forward things by email, but the email route accepts PDFs, photos, and calendar files, and not spreadsheets. If your export is a .csv, upload it in the app rather than emailing it.

4. Read what came across before you delete anything

This is the step people skip, and it is the one that matters. Open each imported trip and check the things a calendar export is most likely to have dropped: confirmation numbers, seat assignments, hotel addresses, and anything that lived in a notes field.

Keep your old account alive until you have done this. There is no prize for cancelling quickly, and an export you have not read is not a migration.

5. Fill the gaps from the original emails

Wherever something is missing, go back to the confirmation email itself and forward that. A real confirmation carries far more than a calendar entry does, and it usually lands in under a minute. This is also the moment where the fourth route pays off: for any booking where the export was thin, the source document was always the better input.

6. Point your future bookings at the new place

The migration is not finished until new confirmations stop going to the old app. If you had a forwarding rule, a calendar subscription, or a connected inbox pointed at the tool you are leaving, turn it off now, while you are thinking about it.

What will not survive the move, honestly

No import is lossless, and it is better to know the shape of the loss in advance.

• Anything the export never contained. A calendar entry that says "Flight to Tokyo" cannot produce a seat number that was not in it.
• Attachments and files held inside the old app. Those generally do not travel with an export, which is another reason to keep the original emails.
• Loyalty numbers and profile settings. These live in your account with the old service, not in a trip.
• Anything you typed by hand into a field the export does not include, such as private notes.

Being fair about the alternatives

TripIt invented this category and is still dependable when your confirmations arrive as clean email text. Much of the sharing and alerting people actually want sits in the paid tier, which is usually what prompts the search for something else, but the core parsing has been solid for years.

Wanderlog is genuinely strong at collaborative planning before anything is booked, and its offline maps are good. It leans toward planning as a group activity rather than organizing what is already booked, so people who arrive with a folder of confirmations sometimes find it is solving a slightly different problem.

Tripsy is a lovely native app that suits couples and small groups who want something tidy and well made.

A spreadsheet or a document is a perfectly reasonable answer, and plenty of organized travelers never use anything else. The cost is simply that you are the parser, every time.

The gaps tend to show up in the same three places, whichever tool you are leaving: formats that are not clean email text, the price of adding the people you are traveling with, and a sign-up wall that stops you finding out whether the thing reads your bookings at all.

Where Petrel fits

• Any format in. Calendar exports, spreadsheets, PDFs, screenshots, photos of a paper booking, and forwarded emails all end up in the same day-by-day itinerary.
• Free collaborators. Anyone you invite can view and edit, without paying, and a view-only link needs no account at all.
• The plan works offline. A trip you have opened stays readable with no signal. Viewing works offline; editing needs a connection.
• Costs live on the trip. Receipts attach to expenses, splits net down to who owes whom, and a work trip can produce a print-ready expense report.
• A recap when you get home, mailed automatically a couple of days after the trip ends.

On privacy, the rules are simple: Petrel does not connect to or scan your inbox, does not sell your data, and does not train AI on your bookings. You send what you want organized, and that is all it sees. This matters more than it sounds during a migration, because an itinerary is a detailed map of where you will be and when.

Your first trip needs no account, which is the point at which most migrations actually get tested. Import one real trip, look at what came across, and decide from there.

The short version

Export a calendar file, a spreadsheet, or a PDF from the app you are leaving. Upload it to the new one. Open each trip and check for the details a calendar entry tends to drop, then patch those gaps by forwarding the original confirmation emails, which were always the richer source. Turn off any forwarding or sync still pointing at the old tool, and only then close the account.

Done in that order, switching costs a few minutes per trip rather than an afternoon, and you never retype a flight number.

You can try it on your next trip at https://petrelvoyage.com. The first trip is free, with no account and no credit card. If you have not booked anything yet, the free itinerary library is a reasonable place to start instead, and there is more on the mechanics in how email forwarding builds an itinerary and in turning PDFs and screenshots into a trip.