After organizing 15+ group trips during my four years at university, I've learned that most planning tools are designed by people who've never had to coordinate a spring break trip with six broke college students.

Three years ago, I was the designated "trip planner" for my friend group at Northwestern University. Between study abroad adventures in Barcelona, weekend escapes to Chicago, and that legendary post-finals road trip to Colorado, I became the guinea pig for every travel planning tool on the market.

The result? A lot of frustration, a few missed connections, and eventually, some genuine insights about what actually works when you're young, broke, and trying to see the world with your friends.

What Doesn't Work (And Why)

The Spreadsheet Trap

Google sheets travel planner template

Every college trip starts the same way: someone creates a Google Sheet with ambitious column headers like "Activity," "Cost," "Duration," and "Notes." It looks professional, organized, responsible.

Then reality hits. Flight times change. Someone finds a better hostel. The museum you wanted to visit is closed on Tuesdays. Suddenly, your neat little spreadsheet looks like a crime scene, with crossed-out cells and confused comments from five different people.

I've spent more time reformatting travel spreadsheets than actually researching destinations. The mobile experience is particularly brutal when you're trying to check your itinerary while navigating a foreign subway system.

The Notion Rabbit Hole

Notion travel planner template

Ah, Notion. The productivity tool that promises to organize your entire life, including your travels. I fell hard for this one during sophomore year, spending hours creating the "perfect" travel planning template with interconnected databases and aesthetic cover photos.

The setup was beautiful. The execution? Not so much. Every trip required significant template customization, and by the time I'd configured everything properly, my friends had already booked their flights using whatever random app they found first.

Notion works brilliantly if you're planning a solo sabbatical with unlimited time for organization. For spontaneous college adventures? It's overkill that slows you down.

TripIt: Built for a Different World

TripIt's email-parsing feature seemed magical: forward your booking confirmations, and it automatically builds your itinerary. Perfect for the digital generation, right?

Wrong. TripIt assumes you're a business traveler with confirmed reservations and structured schedules. College travel is messier than that. We book hostels that don't send confirmation emails. We make plans at local coffee shops. We change our minds constantly.

The tool couldn't adapt to our chaotic planning style, leaving us with half-empty itineraries that missed most of our actual plans.

Wanderlog: Close, But Not Quite

Wanderlog deserves credit for being purpose-built for travel. The map integration is genuinely helpful for understanding distances and logistics. I used it extensively for a junior year trip through Eastern Europe.

But group collaboration felt clunky. When multiple people were adding activities simultaneously, we'd end up with duplicate entries, conflicting times, and general confusion about who had planned what. The interface worked fine for solo planning but struggled with the collaborative chaos that defines college group trips.

Prit: Timeline-Based Planning

Prit approaches travel planning through a visual timeline interface where activities appear chronologically. You can add items by clicking on time slots and adjust schedules through drag-and-drop functionality.

The platform supports creating multiple draft plans within shared workspaces, allowing teams to explore various itinerary ideas freely rather than being confined to single collaborative documents. Its timezone viewer feature stands out among travel planning tools, helping users avoid scheduling errors by displaying plans in different time zones - functionality rarely found elsewhere.

Prit requires minimal setup and is ready to use immediately upon registration. The user interface design is particularly polished and aesthetically pleasing compared to other options in the category.

However, Prit may be unnecessarily complex for simple domestic trips of 1-2 days where timezone considerations aren't relevant. The timeline structure and collaborative features seem better suited for longer international adventures rather than quick local getaways where basic coordination suffices.

What I've Learned About Tool Selection

After testing virtually every travel planning option available, the truth is nuanced: different tools excel in different scenarios.

Prit works well for straightforward collaborative planning where simplicity matters more than advanced features. Notion remains powerful for groups willing to invest setup time and who need extensive customization. Wanderlog's map integration makes it valuable for geographically complex trips.

TripIt still serves organized travelers who prefer automated itinerary building from email confirmations. Even Google Sheets has merit for groups comfortable with spreadsheet workflows.

The Real Verdict

The best travel planning tool isn't about finding the most feature-rich option, it's about matching capabilities to your group's actual planning style and technical comfort level.

For college students juggling academic demands with travel dreams, the winning tool is whichever one your entire group will consistently use without friction. That might be a sophisticated Notion setup, a simple shared document, or something purpose-built like Prit or Wanderlog.

The most important insight from organizing dozens of trips? Spending less time debating tools and more time researching destinations leads to better adventures. Pick something that works for your group, stick with it, and focus on the experiences you're planning to create.

Michael Rodriguez graduated from UCLA with a degree in Economics and has organized travel experiences across four continents. He currently works in Chicago and continues to plan group adventures with fellow alumni.