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Will U Be There vs TripIt: what each one actually does

Run both. TripIt has answered "what are my plans" since 2007, by reading the confirmation emails you forward to plans@tripit.com. Will U Be There takes the other question: which of your friends will be in that city while you are, and what is on near where you are staying those nights. Nothing in TripIt will tell you that Anna lands in Lisbon on your second night. On my side there are no flight numbers and no bookings at all.

So if you fly for work and you want the gate change before the airline texts it to you, buy TripIt Pro and skip the rest of this page. It is $48.99 a year, a figure I read off both store listings on 6 September 2026. The trial before that runs 30 days, and TripIt's help centre tells you to cancel before the end of the thirtieth day or the year bills, with fees already charged non-refundable. Going's January 2026 review rounds the price to $49. Over 309,000 US iPhone ratings sit behind the app at 4.8 stars, built up since its first release on 10 April 2009.

From r/digitalnomad in December 2024: "Got many moments where I found out a friend was nearby but left already." r/AppIdeas had the same request in June 2018, from someone who wanted "an app where I could post my travel plans for work and see if any of my friends or contacts will also be in the same area when I am". Instagram got there first. "Just random found out from an Instagram post but would have been cool to know ahead of time."

What TripIt gives you before you pay

The free tier builds the itinerary and syncs it to your calendar, shares plans with other people, shows a map view with airport and terminal maps, finds places near your hotel, and stores three documents per trip. All of that comes off TripIt's own free-versus-Pro help page, last modified on 28 July, and for a product that launched in 2007 it is a generous free tier. Android passed 5 million downloads at 4.7 stars from 95,800 reviews.

Real-time flight alerts, alternate flights when yours dies, check-in reminders, fare refund monitoring, reward program tracking, risk alerts and 25 documents per trip are what the $48.99 buys, along with Seat Tracker, which in TripIt's words "sends a notification when your desired seat becomes available". Concur completed its acquisition of TripIt on 25 January 2011, about $82 million upfront and up to $120 million over time, and the Play listing still says "TripIt from Concur". If your employer runs SAP Concur, the store description says you may get Pro benefits without paying. Check before you subscribe.

TripIt shipped friend overlap in 2008

On 22 January 2008, TechCrunch covered a set of TripIt features called Closeness alerts. One was "Who's Close To Me?", which "automatically notifies users if their travel plans overlap with fellow travelers while on the road", and beside it sat "Who's Coming to my City?", for colleagues "who will be visiting the users hometown when they're not traveling".

Those are, almost word for word, the two rules I ended up building eighteen years later. The second one carries an edge case people forget. A friend who lives in the city you are flying to counts as a match, but only if they will be home that week rather than off on a trip of their own.

I cannot tell you TripIt removed them, because I could not verify it. The marketing pages at tripit.com serve a JavaScript shell that hands a crawler nothing but a page title. The absence is checkable, though. Today's App Store description runs 2,521 characters and contains no instance of the words friend, overlap, who, event, concert or nearby. Neither does the free-versus-Pro comparison. That description does open by inviting you to "join nearly 20 million travelers".

What a share looks like in each app

TripIt has six ways to share a trip: a private invitation, a public URL, social media, the app, iMessage, and Inner Circle on Pro, which "automatically shares your new and upcoming trips with a select group of family, friends or colleagues". Permissions come in three levels, and only the two edit levels let someone see confirmation numbers, total cost, frequent traveller details and attached documents. All six hand over the itinerary.

Will U Be There shares one city and two dates. Two trips land within 100 km of each other with dates that touch, both people get a push, and what each of them sees is that city and those dates. The rest of your trip list stays invisible to everyone, including the friend you just matched with. Miss someone by up to about a week and the app flags the near miss, so you can move a day if you feel like it.

The jobs, side by side

Everything in the TripIt columns comes from Apple's and Google's store listings and from help.tripit.com, all checked on 6 September 2026.

What each one collects

TripIt's Apple privacy panel lists coarse location, user content, identifiers and usage data as linked to you, used for analytics, customer support, product interaction and product personalisation. Google's data safety card says location, personal info and six other types, encrypted in transit, deletable on request. Inbox Sync is optional, and it connects your mailbox. TripIt "scans the headers of your inbox to look for travel plans" and then parses the contents of the ones that match. It runs over OAuth, which is the right way to build it, and in the company's words "TripIt never asks for or stores your password". The grant is read access to the whole inbox, since a header scan has to run over every message that lands there before it can find the two from an airline.

Mine holds email, display name, username, home city and its coordinates, trip cities and dates, an optional avatar, your friendships, push tokens and a pseudonymous crash identifier. That list is the whole list. Data sits in Supabase in Ireland and crash reports go to Sentry's Frankfurt region. Push goes through Firebase, which can mean a transfer to the US under Standard Contractual Clauses. Download my data gives you a JSON file of everything, and deleting the account means typing your username, after which the purge runs on a 30-day grace period. The longer version is at privacy first.

Running both on the same trip

Book the flight. Forward the confirmation to plans@tripit.com and let TripIt build the itinerary and drop it into your calendar. Then add the same trip in Will U Be There as a city and two dates, and pick which of your groups it may match against. TripIt handles the machinery of getting there. Mine only ever knows a city and two dates, which is enough to say who else will be around and what is on those nights.

Events for the trip appear immediately. They are there before any friend has joined anything, so the app earns its place on a solo trip too. Over 200,000 upcoming events are in the database right now, from more than 360 hand-picked sources across 57 countries, and many of them are free. Coverage is uneven and I will not pretend otherwise. Vienna is dense. A small town may show you nothing.

The wider version of that problem shows up on r/sideprojects in April 2026, where Eventbrite and Facebook Events both get named: "every time i visit somewhere new i waste half a day figuring out what to do. eventbrite only shows ticketed events. facebook events is basically dead. is there something that actually pulls everything into one place free stuff, pop-ups, local events, all of it?" Thirty-two comments, no good answer in the thread. I went through the alternatives at how to find out what's on in a city you're visiting.

What I built for this

It never receives your location. A city name and two dates is the whole of what the server holds, so it cannot show a friend where you are standing. If live tracking is what you want, use Find My or Life360.

A group takes one link and up to 200 people, with no friend requests among them, which is how you cover the friends who never get around to accepting a request. Each trip picks the groups it matches against.

App Store, Google Play, willubethere.app. Free on iPhone and Android, no in-app purchases, no ads, 17 languages.

What it will not do: book anything, parse a confirmation email, warn you about a delayed flight, or organise your itinerary. If you want any of that, TripIt is better at it than anything I could build, and its free tier already covers most of it. More of the planner field in Wanderlog and TripIt alternatives for people who travel with friends.

I still cannot answer why the 2008 features went quiet. The workaround people reached for instead was a shared calendar, and r/digitalnomad reported the result in February 2018. "My friends and I had a shared google calendar that we entered all our plans into but that kind of fell apart."