For my solo food pilgrimage to the Basque Country, I pre-arranged flights in/out of Bilbao, Guggenheim Museum tickets, Michelin Guide restaurant reservations, bus tickets to San Sebastian and Saint-Jean-de-Luz, walking food tours and hotel reservations in each city, and a long list of pintxo spots to hit with notes on each one's food specialty.

Most of this was poorly organized (manually) in my phone's Notes app, with references to specific emails for more information.

I arrived on the first day in Bilbao, and the hotel didn't have me in their system by name, so I spent a good 10 minutes frantically scouring my emails for the confirmation number, cursing myself for holding up the people behind me.

Over the course of the next few days, while I was relaxing at my hotel (after finally getting in) in between pre-planned stops, I started building a personal tool that would organize all of my bookings automatically and keep all relevant information at my fingertips.

Thus, Petrel was born and named after one of my favorite birds.

It started as a personal pet project but I shared it with some friends that were looking for something just like it so I ended up turning it into an app and website for all to benefit. It's completely free to try without even signing up.

On my next group trip, I built out logical collaboration features to allow groups to vote, split expenses, share notes, and add pictures all within the same ecosystem.

I've slowly improved the parsing and itinerary logic and built in convenient features such as weather, estimated travel times, an encryption-protected area to store copies of personal information, and a comprehensive travel log with fun stats. I also made it so that the parsing tool can accept almost any file type. However, the tool doesn't do anything to assist on the planning side and doesn't provide true flight alert pushes, despite having live flight status syncing.

I would love for more people to test it out, challenge the parser, and let me know their thoughts and experience.