TripIt is a wow-oh-wow tool, a life-changing tool, an I-can’t-believe-I-ever-left-home-without-it tool. The concept is simple – just forward all your travel confirmations to plans@tripit.com, which is connected to the email address you use to forward. TripIt absorbs your confirmation and makes all the plans available on your mobile device.

Let’s say you’re planning a trip to Chicago in May. In January, you book the airfare and forward the confirmation. You find the perfect hotel room in April, and you snag a great deal on a rental car the day before you leave. TripIt has been using your forwarded confirmations to organize your trip behind the scenes; and when you head to the airport for your flight to Chicago, you open TripIt on your smartphone and open the trip that the app has named “Chicago, May 2014.” Inside, you’ll find your flight information, your hotel check-in time and confirmation number, the location of the rental car counter, and even the weather report for your stay. No more digging in your bag to find the confirmation you printed out to tell the taxi driver what hotel you’re going to, or searching your email to figure out what time you have to get up to come home. The first time you use it, TripIt will prove itself to be an essential travel tool.

WorldMate is a worthy – perhaps superior – TripIt competitor. You don’t have to forward your confirmations to WorldMate – it searches automatically. (So does TripIt for Gmail inboxes, but I found this service to be unreliable and buggy.) Both services are available on a wide range of mobile platforms, and they run neck-and-neck with their feature lists for the paid versions; but WorldMate’s free version includes goodies such as a currency exchange calculator (so you don’t have to use a separate one like XE Currency apps). And then there’s the price. TripIt Pro is $49/year, and WorldMate Gold is $9.99.

TripIt made Beth’s Top Travel Tools list!