You already receive every detail of your trip by email. Forwarding is the fastest way to turn that pile into one ordered itinerary. Here is how it works, which addresses to use, and why forwards fail.
A single trip generates a startling number of emails. Outbound flight, return flight, the hotel, the second hotel, the rental car, the train between two cities, the ferry, the restaurant you booked three months ago, the museum tickets. Each one arrives on its own day, from its own sender, in its own format, and by the week of departure they are scattered across an inbox with several thousand other messages.
Copying all of that into a planning app by hand is work nobody does twice. Forwarding is the shortcut: you send the confirmation to a special address, something on the other end reads it, and the booking appears on a timeline in the right place. No retyping, no screenshots, no spreadsheet.
Forwarding. You send specific emails to a special address. The service only ever sees what you deliberately sent it. This is what Departure Ready, Wanderlog, Tripsy and CheckMyTrip do.
Inbox scanning. You connect your mailbox once and the service reads it looking for bookings. Less effort, but it means granting standing access to your email. TripIt offers this as Inbox Sync for Gmail, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Yahoo Mail and Outlook.com. Departure Ready deliberately does not offer it.
Checked against each service's own documentation on 5 August 2026.
| App | Forwarding address | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Departure Ready | Your own private address, issued at signup | Any inbox can forward to it. 7-day free trial, then $14.99 a year. |
| TripIt | plans@tripit.com | One shared address. Forwarding from an address not on your account creates a second account. Also offers Inbox Sync. |
| CheckMyTrip | trips@checkmytrip.com | Free. Also accepts a 6-character booking reference instead of an email. |
| Wanderlog | A different address per trip, like trip+123@wanderlog.com | You pick the trip by choosing which address you send to. |
| Tripsy | A unique address per user | Forwarding requires an active Tripsy PRO subscription. Unsupported providers are added for manual assignment. |
A screenshot, a copy and paste into a fresh message, or an itinerary you typed yourself has none of the structure a parser looks for. Forward the message the airline or hotel actually sent you.
Some clients strip the HTML and send plain text only, or restructure the message during forwarding. Microsoft Outlook is documented by TripIt as a known problem here, to the point that one of their suggested workarounds is using a different email provider. Departure Ready reads the plain text and the HTML body together, specifically because mobile clients often hide the itinerary in only one of them.
Most services identify you by the sending address. Forward from an address they do not know and the booking goes nowhere, or worse, silently into a new account. Departure Ready identifies you by the private address you are sending to, not the one you are sending from, so any inbox works.
A growing number of confirmations say little more than "your booking is confirmed, view your itinerary" with everything behind a login. There is nothing in the message to read. No forwarding-based service can solve this one. Open the link, then forward the detailed confirmation or save the itinerary as a PDF and attach that.
This is the one that separates the architectures. Template-based organizers maintain a list of vendors they have written parsers for, and TripIt states plainly that boutique hotels, restaurants and smaller regional suppliers may not be on it. Departure Ready has no list, because the email is read rather than matched.
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Your itinerary will be in your phone before you finish packing.