Your mailbox and photos hold your whole travel history. We excavate it, layer by layer, and hand you the evidence.
Gmail connects read-only in about a minute. Nothing is ever sent from your accounts.
A confirmation email from 2011. A folder of geotagged photos you never looked at twice. A cancelled hotel booking you forgot you ever made. Nobody sits down and writes their own travel history, because the evidence is buried in places nobody thinks to search: sent mail, photo metadata, an export you downloaded once and never opened again.
Ask most people how many countries they have visited, or what year they went to that one wedding in another city, and they guess. Not because the trip did not matter, but because the record of it lives in a mailbox with 40,000 other messages, or a photo library nobody has scrolled past 2019 in years. The information is not missing. It is unread.
Trip Archaeology reads what you already have and puts your whole traveling life back together, one labeled find at a time, with the evidence attached to every entry so you never have to take our word for it.
Most people have never opened all four at once. Trip Archaeology does, in one pass, and shows its work.
Gmail connects with read-only Open Authorization (OAuth) access (Outlook supported too), the same permission model your calendar app or a flight-tracking tool already uses. We read booking and travel confirmations going back as far as your mailbox does. We never send a single message from your account, and we cannot delete or modify anything already there.
Geotagged photos prove where you actually stood, even on a trip that generated no email at all: a weekend with no hotel booked, a drive to see family. Facebook and Instagram exports (files you download and upload yourself, never a live social login) add check-ins and place tags your mailbox never saw.
Each trip is marked Confirmed, Corroborated, or Inferred, with the exact booking, photo run, or post that proves it, shown right on the card. Bookings that reconcile with a cancellation are pulled off the main timeline automatically, before you ever see them.
Accept, correct, or reject any entry, or select all in one pass when a whole batch is right. A recurring place (a second home, a family visit, a place you go for work) is asked about once, and the answer applies to every visit, past and future, so you are never asked the same question twice.
A verdict with no evidence is a guess wearing a badge. Most travel apps show you a trip card and expect you to trust it. Trip Archaeology shows you the card and the reason it exists, so the difference between "we found a confirmation email" and "we noticed you were somewhere for four days" is never hidden behind the same green checkmark.
So every entry in your history shows exactly what proved it, right beside the label:
A real booking: a confirmation email, an itinerary, a receipt, with dates and a confirmation number.
A booking backed by presence: your photos from those same dates, in that same place. This is the strongest tier, and it is the one your history book leads with.
Presence with no booking behind it: a run of photos, a place-tagged post. Shown as inferred, with the reason ("12 photos in Rome, May 14 to 17, 2019, no booking found") until you confirm it.
A hotel you booked and cancelled is not a trip you took, and it never lands on your main timeline. It is kept in its own "trips you almost took" view, so the record of what you planned survives right alongside what you did.
Gmail connects by OAuth, and Outlook is supported the same way. We read travel confirmations: flights, hotels, cars, and the dates and confirmation numbers attached to them. Nothing is ever sent from your account, and no message already there is changed.
Your photo library's location and timestamp data proves where you stood, even on trips with no booking at all: a weekend drive, a stay with family, a trip paid for by someone else. Presence evidence catches what a mailbox search never will.
Upload your own export files, downloaded directly from your accounts. Check-ins and place-tagged posts fill gaps your mailbox and photos cannot, especially for years before your photo library began.
Accept, correct, reject, or select all. Every entry is yours to adjust before it becomes part of your history, and a rejection is remembered so the same guess never resurfaces on a later import.
A second home, a yearly family visit, a place you return to for work: the archive asks about the pattern once, and the answer applies to every visit, past and future, so a place you go every summer never turns into 40 separate trip cards.
Cancelled bookings are reconciled and kept in their own layer, never mixed into your real travel history, so the record of what you planned survives without pretending it happened.
A beautiful, shareable map and timeline of everywhere you have been, ready to send in a message or post on its own, with no account required for the person receiving it.
Export your archive as a PDF history book: every trip, every year, laid out to keep, print, or hand down, the way a photo album used to work before the photos scattered across five different apps.
A trip shared with you can be claimed into your own history with one tap. No duplicate entries, ever, and no re-typing the dates someone else already confirmed.
Your data exports as CSV, JSON, or a PDF history book, whichever you need. It is your history; it was never designed to be hard to get back out.
Delete your archive and it is gone, not soft-hidden behind a settings toggle. The underlying imported data goes with it. We hold nothing back for later.
Some people want the whole story, with the dates in order: a printed history book that puts every trip in order, from a college semester abroad through a decade of family holidays, so the story of where you have been is not scattered across three apps and a shoebox of ticket stubs.
Planning a fortieth birthday trip and cannot remember the last time everyone was in the same country together? The timeline answers it in seconds, with the photos and bookings to back it up, instead of a group chat full of guesses.
Families remember trips differently, and arguments about "that was 2016, not 2017" are common and pointless. A shared, evidence-backed timeline settles it once, and lets everyone claim their own copy of a trip they were on together.
A shareable map and timeline means the next time someone asks how many countries you have visited, or wants to see your travel history, you have an actual answer instead of a shrug and a rough guess.
Staying with family or friends leaves no booking behind. When photos or check-ins put you somewhere more than 100 miles from home overnight, that shows up as a trip, with lodging described as "with family or friends" instead of an invented hotel.
A single day away, with no night spent elsewhere, is a day trip, not a trip. It is tracked separately and kept off the main timeline by default, so a Tuesday drive to a doctor's appointment two towns over never inflates your travel count.
A work mailbox is full of other people's bookings and business trips that are not personal travel history. Work-shaped patterns (weekday-only, a company travel desk in the sender) are set aside from your personal timeline rather than folded in.
A cancellation is reconciled against its original booking using the confirmation number, and the trip moves to the "trips you almost took" layer automatically. You never have to manually clean up a plan that fell through.
When a family member shares the same trip, claiming it links your account to the same underlying record instead of creating a second, slightly different version of the same week.
If neither your mailbox nor your photos have anything for a stretch of years, the archive says so plainly rather than guessing. An unanswered gap is not the same as a trip that did not happen, and the product never pretends otherwise.
Measured on a real 20-year Gmail archive and Apple Photos library, held out and graded the same way described below.
The method: every trip already logged in TripIt over nearly two decades was treated as ground truth and held out of the import entirely. The engine then rebuilt a history from scratch, using only mailbox confirmations, TripIt's own notification email, and photo geotags, and its output was graded against that held-out list afterward, never during. That is why the number is a recall rate against a real record, not a satisfaction score against nothing.
A match counted only when the rebuilt entry's destination and date range overlapped the held-out TripIt record; a right city with the wrong year, or a date range that missed entirely, counted as a miss, not a partial credit. The 17 trips the run did not recover are the reason the evidence tiers exist at all: a history engine that only shows Confirmed entries would have quietly dropped every one of them instead of flagging the gap.
Travel happens together. When someone in your family shares a trip, you claim it and it appears in your own archive, correctly attributed to you, without creating a second copy of the same trip in the household's records.
Most tools that let a family share travel data end up with five slightly different versions of the same honeymoon, each with its own dates and its own missing photos. Claiming links everyone back to one underlying record, so the family's shared history stays one history, not five overlapping guesses.
Up to five people, one shared foundation of trips, everyone's own timeline still their own. A parent can start the household archive and invite the rest of the family in as each person is ready to connect their own mailbox.
| Trip Archaeology | TripIt | Google Timeline | Polarsteps / Been | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reaches back | As far as your mailbox and photos go (years to decades) | About 90 days on a calendar feed | About 90 days, on-device, since December 2024 | As far back as your uploaded trips |
| Evidence shown per trip | Yes: the exact email, photo run, or post, labeled Confirmed / Corroborated / Inferred | Trip cards, no underlying evidence shown | Location dots, no travel context | Manual entry; no automatic evidence |
| Builds itself from your mailbox | Yes, automatically | Yes, from forwarded confirmation email | No, mailbox not read | No, manual entry |
| Exports your data | CSV, JSON, or PDF, on request | No CSV export | On-device JSON export while retained | Manual trip export |
| One-time price | $49.99 | No, subscription only | Free | One-time (been), price set per app store |
Every tool in this table is solving a real problem, and none of them is trying to solve this one. TripIt is built to organize a trip you are about to take, from forwarded confirmation email going forward; it was never designed to look backward 20 years. Google Timeline was, until the policy changed at the end of 2024, one of the best passive travel records anyone had by accident, and losing that multi-year history to a 90-day on-device window is a real loss for anyone who never exported it in time. Polarsteps and Been are built for people who are already deliberate trackers, logging a trip as they take it; they are not designed to reconstruct the 20 years before someone downloaded the app.
Sources, checked directly: tripit.com/pro ($49/year, per published third-party pricing roundups as of August 2026, TripIt's own pricing page did not load for direct verification), Google's own Timeline documentation (on-device, roughly 90 days of history since the December 2024 change), polarsteps.com/plus (€29.99/year, verified live), and been.app (one-time purchase, exact price set per app store). Checked August 2026; re-verified on a 30-day cadence.
Gmail and Outlook connect with read-only access. We can see travel confirmations; we cannot send, delete, or modify a single message in your account. This permission is enforced by the mail provider itself, not by a promise on this page: the OAuth scope you grant is a read-only one, and you can revoke it from your Google or Microsoft account settings at any moment, independent of anything on this site.
A mailbox holds more than your own travel. A work inbox in particular is full of other people's bookings, forwarded confirmations, and group trips where you were only copied. Trip Archaeology keeps any booking that names someone else out of your personal history by default; it never becomes part of your record unless you claim it yourself.
Your most recent year, free, so you can see your own history before you decide. Buy the full lifetime archive once, for $49.99, ever.
Start free with your last yearEvery household member gets their own archive, with shared trips claimable instead of duplicated.
Start a family archiveOne purchase, no subscription. Nothing about a trip you have bought access to is ever taken away.
Read-only access to one mailbox (Gmail or Outlook) to start. Photos, and a Facebook or Instagram export, are optional add-ons that fill in trips your mailbox never saw.
No. Your mailbox is scanned by the import engine, never opened by a human reviewer. Only you see the results.
It is kept, clearly labeled, in a separate 'trips you almost took' view. It never appears as a trip you actually took.
Only what you choose to share. A shared trip can be claimed into someone else's history without duplicating it.
TripIt tracks new bookings going forward, on roughly a 90-day calendar feed, and does not export to CSV. Trip Archaeology rebuilds your whole past, with the evidence for every trip shown, and exports as CSV, JSON, or PDF.
Every entry is a candidate until you review it. Accept, correct the dates or place, or reject it outright, one at a time or all at once.
No. Your travel history is yours; it is not shared, sold, or used to train anything outside your own account.
Yes, at any time. Delete removes your archive and its source data. Nothing is kept in reserve.
Yes. TripIt notification mail helps when it exists, but the engine builds from your own booking confirmations, photos, and exports either way. This is the case Trip Archaeology is built for: someone with years of travel and no app that ever tracked it.
You still get a real history for the years your mailbox and photos cover. Nothing before that is invented; a gap in the evidence stays a gap, not a guess dressed up as fact.
Yes. Your most recent year imports free, with the same evidence labels the full archive uses, so you can judge the accuracy on your own trips before deciding on the lifetime archive.
Curious exactly how each piece works, down to the verification step for every claim on this page? The full capability reference lists every import source, every label, and how to check each one against your own account.
Leave your email and we will send you the link to connect your mailbox and start excavateing your history.
There is no charge for the first year, no card required to see it, and no obligation to buy the lifetime archive once you have looked at it. The whole point is to let the accuracy speak for itself on your own trips before you decide anything.