Petrel

Petrel is a travel organizer that turns scattered booking documents into a day-by-day itinerary. It is built for the part of a trip that starts after reservations have been made, when flights, hotels, tickets, and restaurant confirmations are spread across an inbox, screenshots, PDFs, and notes. A traveler forwards or uploads the material they want Petrel to read, and the service extracts the useful details and places each reservation in chronological order. The resulting plan combines times, addresses, confirmation information, travel time between stops, maps, weather, and a countdown to what comes next. This removes much of the manual transcription involved in maintaining a trip spreadsheet without trying to choose the destination or make taste-based planning decisions for the traveler.

Petrel accepts more than neatly formatted confirmation emails. The official guide lists forwarded messages, PDFs, screenshots, spreadsheets, photos of paper vouchers, individual files, and whole folders as inputs, with support for bookings from different providers and languages. It pulls out flights, stays, reservations, confirmation codes, times, and addresses, then sorts them into the relevant days. The traveler can review and edit the itinerary after it is built, and items without formal paperwork can be added alongside parsed bookings. Live flight information puts gates, terminals, and delays in the same view as the rest of the day's plan. Travel times between stops make the sequence easier to judge before leaving, while offline access keeps the itinerary readable when a reliable connection isn't available. Editing still requires a connection.

Sharing is designed around a travel group rather than one paid account per person. The trip owner can invite companions to view and edit the plan for free, and shared costs can be split inside the trip. A public link is available for someone who needs the schedule without installing an app or creating an account. Each trip can also expose a live ICS calendar feed for Apple Calendar or Google Calendar, so flights, stays, and plans remain synchronized as the itinerary changes. A one-time calendar import is available for people who don't want a subscription feed, and an account-level feed can cover multiple trips. Petrel links to iPhone and Android apps from its site, while the web flow allows a first itinerary to be created without an account.

The product covers more than the outbound schedule. Work and personal trips can be kept separate, receipts can be attached to flights, stays, or expenses, and a reimbursement-ready expense report can be exported with vendors, categories, totals, and supporting receipts. A device-locked document vault is available for passports, identification, notes, and key contacts, with the site stating that the company can't read those encrypted documents. After a trip, Petrel can turn the route, miles, and photos into a recap styled like a travel story. It also keeps a travel passport with countries, continents, miles, nights, and other accumulated statistics. These additions make the itinerary useful before, during, and after travel rather than becoming a disposable list once the return flight lands.

Petrel fits independent travelers, families, groups, and people managing business travel who already have bookings but don't want to rebuild them by hand. Its clearest distinction is input flexibility combined with deliberate inbox boundaries. The service doesn't connect to or scan a mailbox. A user chooses which emails or documents to forward, and the site says it doesn't sell that data or train AI on booking content. This is more private than granting ongoing inbox access, but it does require the traveler to send or upload each relevant item. The focus also remains itinerary assembly rather than discovery or reservation checkout. Someone looking for flight search, hotel booking, or a recommendation engine will still need other services, while someone with confirmed plans gets a single operational view of the trip.

Access is freemium and unusually trip based. The first trip includes every feature from planning through the post-trip recap, with no credit card and no account required to start. That trip remains editable, viewable, and exportable after it ends. Creating a second trip triggers the paid choice. Voyager costs $49 per year for unlimited trips, or a traveler can buy one additional trip for a one-time payment of $9.99. Invited companions don't pay to view or edit someone else's trip, though they need their own plan once they create a second trip of their own. Both paid options are purchased inside the app. This structure makes it easy to test Petrel on a real journey, while occasional travelers can avoid an annual subscription by paying for one more itinerary.