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Group trip planning apps compared (2026)

No single app plans a group trip. There are four jobs inside one, and most groups end up running two tools and a chat thread. Doodle, WhenAvailable and a shared spreadsheet pick the dates. Wanderlog, TripIt and a Google Doc hold the plan once the dates exist, and Splitwise or Tricount handle the money afterwards. The fourth job is finding out who else you already know will be in that city on those days, which is where Pangea and Will U Be There live. Every price below came off a store listing or the vendor's own pricing page on 6 September 2026.

Troupe, the free ranked-choice voting app that two of the 2026 comparisons ranking for this query still recommend, did not load when I tried it this week.

The eleven apps, side by side

The dates are where groups actually stall

In January 2021 someone asked r/travel for "an app that helps you coordinate dates amongst the group... selecting all of the dates you CAN travel and then the app tells you what overlapped?" Ten comments came back. Every one of them was a calendar, a spreadsheet or a couch-surfing site, and none of them was the app being described.

Doodle is the first name people reach for, and as of 6 September 2026 its free plan gives you one Group Poll, one Booking Page, one 1:1 and basic sign-up sheets. Pro costs USD 11 per seat per month billed annually and Team costs 16. Per seat, per month. Doodle sells to companies that schedule meetings for a living, and the free tier is what is left over for a group planning one trip a year.

WhenAvailable does this one job better on free. Twenty guests maximum, 80 date or time options, unlimited polls, and the people you invite vote without making an account, which is the part that decides whether your least online friend answers at all. A single upgraded poll costs $10 and unlimited costs $38 a year. The site was advertising a September rise to $49 and $14 when I read it, so check the number before you plan around it.

Both of those cover one step of a longer sequence. The twelve-week version, including what happens when the grid comes back inconclusive and somebody has to decide anyway, is in how to plan a group trip with friends.

The Google Doc that keeps beating the apps

On 31 August 2025 someone in r/TravelHacks asked how to share an itinerary with five adults going abroad together for the first time. Seventy-five comments. The reply that won, at 14 upvotes, was "Shared Google Docs might work. Simple, accessible, no extra cost." Further down: "I wouldn't over complicate things."

Then read a 2023 r/travel post: "We have previously used a google sheet and various group chats - it was AWFUL."

Both threads describe the same setup and land in opposite places. The difference is how many separate windows the plan got spread across. Nothing counts until it is typed into the doc, and one document everyone can edit costs nothing and holds up for years. Spread the same trip over that document, four chat threads, a poll buried inside one of them and a separate argument about who owes what, and you get the version people write in capitals.

Wanderlog and TripIt are solving different problems

Wanderlog is the one I would install if a group wants a shared itinerary with a map on it. Free on web, iOS and Android, and the free tier already carries the collaborative itinerary, the map view, reservations forwarded by email and basic expense tracking. Pro is $5.99 a month. The annual price is messier than the listicles admit, because the US App Store lists several annual tiers between $31.99 and $59.99, so call it roughly $40 a year and ignore the blog that prints $8 a month.

TripIt was never a group tool. The app is free and Pro auto-renews at $48.99, stated in those words on the App Store listing. Its job is to eat your confirmation emails and hand back one itinerary, which works beautifully when one person is holding five bookings for one trip. Six people each holding their own get six itineraries and no shared view. The Pro extras are flight monitoring and refund tracking, aimed squarely at someone who flies for work every week.

Both turn up in the r/TravelHacks "must have travel apps" thread from April 2025, 441 upvotes and 214 comments, next to Splitwise, Google My Maps, Citymapper and AllTrails.

Troupe: check the recommendation before you follow it

JetBlue Travel Products launched Troupe on 21 September 2022, a free app where a group ranked destinations and the votes settled the argument. Good idea. On 6 September 2026 troupe.com has no A record. The Cloudflare nameservers are still set and the Google mail records still answer, so somebody is paying for the domain, but nothing serves the site and both troupe.com and www.troupe.com fail to fetch. The last Internet Archive snapshot of the homepage is 27 March 2025. An App Store search for "troupe" returns fifteen US results and JetBlue's app is not among them.

I found no shutdown announcement, so I am not giving you a date. There is a site that does not resolve and an app that is not in store search, and two of the comparison pages ranking for this query right now still list it as a live recommendation. One of them was updated on 2 September 2026. Four days before I checked.

Splitting the money: Splitwise or Tricount

Splitwise is free on iPhone, Android and web, and its one durable advantage is that somebody in your group already has it. The free tier caps how many expenses you can add in a day. Splitwise does not publish that number on any first-party page I could reach, and the figures circulating in blog posts contradict each other, so take it as a warning rather than a number: a busy group will meet the cap, and the app will tell you when you do. Pro lifts it and adds receipt scanning, currency conversion, charts and full expense search. On the US App Store the in-app purchases run $2.99, $3.99 and $4.99 monthly and $29.99 or $39.99 annually, with a note that pricing varies by country.

Tricount has no paid tier at all. Its own site puts it in one line: "Experience the easiest way to track group expenses, 100% free!" The App Store listing shows version 14.1.0, shipped 13 July 2026, 4.9 stars across 6,900 ratings and a claim of over 17 million users. bunq, the Dutch neobank, bought it on 3 May 2022. It had about 5.4 million users then.

I live in Amsterdam and I default to Tricount, because a shared link beats making an account and there is no ceiling to hit. Splitwise wins the argument in practice anyway, because it is already on everybody's phone before the trip starts.

SquadTrip is a different category of product

SquadTrip sells to retreat and event organisers, tour operators, travel agencies and destination wedding planners, and it claims 2,000 organisers with 50,000 travellers booked. There is a free plan. Paid plans start at $29 a month and the booking fee is 6% total, which includes Stripe's 2.9% plus 30 cents, so if you are collecting deposits from thirty strangers for a yoga week, that fee is what you pay to never chase a bank transfer again. For six friends splitting an apartment it is a payment processor you do not need.

Nobody in that list tells you who else will be there

Every app above starts after the group exists and the trip is agreed. The other question arrives too late, usually in the shape of this r/digitalnomad comment from December 2024: "Got many moments where I found out a friend was nearby but left already."

Pangea is the serious attempt at answering it earlier. Free on iOS and Android with no in-app purchases, currently version 0.8.23 from 10 August 2026, and its own description offers to let you "see who's nearby, who's visiting your city, and where your trips overlap so you never miss the chance to meet in real life." It bought Overlap in November 2025 and made Overlap's founder its head of design. Its App Store privacy label lists coarse location linked to the user, which is where it parts company with what I built. If you want the nearby half as well as the overlap half, install Pangea. There is a longer inventory of the rest of that category in apps that tell you when friends are in the same city.

Where Will U Be There fits in the four jobs

I built Will U Be There for the fourth job and nothing else. A trip is a city and two dates. Your friends add theirs, and when two trips land within 100 km of each other on days that touch, both phones get a push. Miss each other by up to about a week and it flags the near miss instead, which is usually while the flight is still cheap to move.

Groups run on one link. Make a group for the ski week or the conference, send the URL, and anyone who joins and adds a trip shows up in your matches, up to 200 people, with no friend requests going back and forth. Per trip you choose which groups it may match against, so a work trip does not surface to the ski crowd. That link is my whole answer to the friend who will not install another app.

The app never receives your location. A city name and two dates is everything it is ever given, so there is no GPS in it and no live position anywhere in the data. A matched friend sees that one city and those dates. The rest of your trip list stays invisible.

It does not plan the trip, book anything or split a bill, so use Tricount for the money and one document for the plan. On top of the matching it adds events: concerts, exhibitions, festivals and markets within 15 km of where you are staying and inside your dates, drawn from over 200,000 upcoming events across 57 countries and more than 360 hand-picked sources. Coverage is uneven and some cities are thin.

Free, no ads, no in-app purchases, 17 languages, data hosted in the EU, on iPhone and Android. What gets stored and what leaves is itemised on the privacy first page.

Before you install whatever a 2026 comparison recommends, open its App Store page and read the date next to the version number. Wanderlog shipped 2.220 on 2 September, Tricount 14.1.0 back on 13 July, and Troupe has no page to open at all.