Keeping track of flight details
The flight information for one trip typically lives in: a confirmation email, a screenshot of that email, an airline app, a calendar entry someone made by hand, and a message in a group chat. Five copies, at least one of which is wrong.
Why it scatters
Each copy is made for a reason. The screenshot is for no signal. The calendar entry is so it shows up on the day. The group chat message is so everyone else knows. None of these are silly — they are all solving a real problem.
The trouble is that when something changes, only one copy gets updated.
What you actually need to hand
Far less than a full confirmation email:
- Flight number and date — the two things every agent asks for
- Departure and arrival times, in local time at each end
- The booking reference — six characters, the only thing you truly need
- Which airport, where a city has more than one
Terminal numbers change; do not commit them to memory. Everything else on a confirmation email is marketing.
Times are the thing people get wrong
Two rules that prevent most airport problems:
- Arrival times are local to the arrival airport. An overnight flight landing at 06:15 lands at 06:15 there.
- A flight that crosses midnight arrives on a different date to the one on your ticket header. Book the hotel for the night you arrive, not the night you left.
The first and last nights are decided by your flights
This is the connection people miss. An 11pm landing does not mean a hotel in the city you are heading to — it means a bed near the airport. A 6am departure means the same in reverse.
Work out the first and last nights from the flights, before planning anything else. It is the most common reason a first-draft itinerary has to be redone.
Check-in is a deadline, not a suggestion
Two things catch people out often enough to be worth writing down.
Online check-in windows close. Most airlines open check-in 24 to 48 hours before departure and close it one to two hours before. Miss it and some carriers charge for an airport boarding pass — a genuinely irritating way to lose money on a trip you have already paid for.
Bag drop closes before the gate does. The "arrive two hours early" advice is really about bag drop, which typically shuts 45 to 60 minutes before departure. If you are travelling hand luggage only, you have more slack than you think. If you are not, you have less.
Connections need more room than the airline sells you
Airlines will sell a connection with as little as 35 minutes between flights. That number assumes everything is on time, the gates are close, and you do not have to clear immigration.
A workable rule:
- Same terminal, no border: an hour is fine.
- Different terminal, or a border to cross: two hours.
- Separate bookings: three, and accept that if you miss it, nobody owes you anything — two separate tickets are two separate contracts, and the first airline's delay is not the second airline's problem.
That last point is the expensive one. A cheap self-connected itinerary is cheap because you are carrying the risk.
Put them where the plan is
The reason the details scatter is that the plan lives in one place and the flights live in your inbox. Putting the flight on the trip — the number, the times, the reference — means one copy, in the place you are already looking.
Doing this in heytripp
Paste the confirmation email into heytripp and Tripp reads it: the flight number, the airports, the times, the booking reference, and the cost. It lands on the trip as a real flight, next to the places, so the first and last nights can be planned around it.
If the same booking gets pasted twice it is not duplicated. And because flights carry a cost, they are part of the trip's total rather than a number in a separate sum.