This year, I have traveled quite a lot and booked flights, hotels, tickets, and train tickets on various platforms like Ctrip, Fliggy, 12306, Klook, and the JAL official website. However, every time I travel, I need to look up the order information in each app, which feels very inconvenient.

To solve this problem, I have found similar software, and the one that best meets my needs is Tripit. However, it does not support Chinese and does not have intelligent parsing functionality. This software seems to have been around for ten years. It also works by forwarding the order email to a designated mailbox and then gradually adding flight information through the segmented way on the iPhone. I gave up using it after trying it once.

Now that AI is so popular, I decided to develop an app based on my needs. The technical process is actually quite simple: forward the order email to a fixed mailbox, and GPT will parse it, automatically store it in the database, and download the order attachment at the same time, making it convenient for use during travel for airport check-in and hotel check-in.

However, I have never made an app myself, so I found a friend who does front-end development, Taoqun, and proposed the idea. We decided to do it right away. Although he had never made an iOS app before, he thought it should not be difficult. So, he took out a previously idle company and registered an Apple developer account. Due to the need for filing in China, this registration process took more than a month, with back-and-forth phone calls and emails.

The development took about three weeks, with both the front-end and back-end of the app completed by my friend, while I was responsible for email synchronization and parsing.

Originally, it seemed to be completed at this point, but when I actually used it, I found that I still had to check the flight status on Umetrip, which felt inconvenient. Various airline apps have a lot of information, but for personal use, I only care about where the check-in counter is, whether the flight time has changed, where the boarding gate is, and which baggage carousel it is. Other distracting information is completely useless to me. So we also did the flight status part. So far, all the travel-related functionalities are basically enough. I have been using it for two months and it feels pretty good. Now, I am sharing it for everyone to try.

TripsFlow functions:

  • Send flight, hotel, ticket, and train ticket orders to the parsing email, and they will appear on your app in about 1-2 minutes.
  • The PDF attachment of the flight order will be attached below the order for easy confirmation of order information during the trip.
  • Orders will be categorized by flights, hotels, train tickets, and tickets.
  • Flight orders have real-time flight status.