There have been times during my career as a lawyer when I needed to do a lot of airline travel. Fortunately, those days have been behind me for a while, but even for more occasional travel, I still appreciate tools that improve the experience of airline travel. One of my favorite such tools is TripIt, which I first reviewed a decade ago. Even if you just use the free version of TripIt, it is a fantastic resource for managing all of a travel itinerary: flights, hotels, restaurants, car rentals, etc. I reviewed TripIt Pro back in 2017, and it offers even more features, including useful and quick notification of airline cancellations and delays. I consider the service so valuable that I have paid for it ($50/year) ever since then.
Flighty is another travel app that I've heard good things about since it debuted in 2019, and the app received lots of buzz over the last few months because of its improved notification features that make the app even more useful on your lock screen or in the Dynamic Island at the top of the iPhone 14 Pro screen. You can download the app for free, but as I explain below, you need to make an in-app purchase for the Pro version to take full advantage of what makes this app special. The Pro version is $50/year, but you can also subscribe for just $5.99 a month through an in-app purchase, which means that you can choose to only pay for the app during the months that you are traveling. There is also a $90 Flighty Pro annual plan for an entire family. The rest of this review assumes that you are using the Pro version of Flighty.
I used both Flightly and TripIt Pro during recent trips to and from New York for the holidays. No, I didn't fly Southwest and experience that disaster in late 2022, but I did have my return trip on a Delta flight canceled, so I was able to see how Flighty handles travel disruption.
Getting data into Flighty
TripIt is great because you can forward to plans@tript.com the booking confirmation email from your airline, hotel, etc., and TripIt will automatically decipher the key detail and create an itinerary for you. I was delighted to learn that Flighty works with TripIt and quickly imported all of my current and past trips. If you don't already use TripIt, you can configure Flighty to import that information from an email, or you can add trips manually.
Notably, Flighty does not keep track of hotels, restaurants, meetings, car rentals, etc. Thus, Flighty does not in any way replace TriptIt as a service for managing itineraries. Flighty's focus is only on your flights.
Once Flighty knows about your flights, you can see your upcoming flights in a list.
Flighty also shows you information about your historical flights. You can see the information either in a list or in a fun "passport" mode. It was interesting to learn that over the past decade that I've been putting data into TripIt, I've flown the equivalent of going around the world 7.6 times.
Flight information
When it is time to travel, the information that Flight provides is excellent, and better yet, the way that it presents the information is fantastic.
When I am waiting for my plane to arrive at an airport, I often find myself wondering where the plane is coming from and whether it is on-time. Flighty provides this information for the past 25 hours, so you can start to see where your plane is—and whether or not it is on schedule—the day before you leave. This is a great way to get an early indication if there may be a delay or other problem with your flight.
Flighty also gives you an incredible amount of detail about your plane flight. The key information like flight number, gate, and scheduled/actual times is prominently displayed at the top. But other information is included like weather forecasts, detailed information about the plane, a detailed timeline, your travel history on the same plane, etc.
The information that you can get from Flighty is more detailed than what you get from TripIt Pro, although both services provide you with the most important information.
Notifications
As I noted in my review of TripIt Pro, that service often sends you useful information in an email, such as a connection summary so that you can the gate where you are landing and the gate to which you need to travel for your connecting flight. TripIt Pro also uses the iPhone's notification system to push certain information to you. It works well.
But Flighty notifications are much better. First, Flighty doesn't use email at all, which I consider a plus. When I am traveling, I often receive a large number of emails while I am in the air, so an email from TripIt Pro can sometimes get lost among the other emails. Also, it can be cumbersome to have to open the Mail app to see the information that TripIt Pro has sent to me.
Flighty's notifications are all iPhone notifications: both traditional iPhone notifications and the new Live Activities notifications on the iPhone. And these notifications typically contain more information than TripIt Pro's notification. For example, when I landed in New York before Christmas, TripIt's traditional notification told me my gate of arrival and the baggage claim number, which is the most important information. But Flighty's traditional notification also told me how long my taxi to the gate would be (which can sometimes be lengthy at an airport like LaGuardia) and told me how early I was arriving (nice to know if someone is meeting you at the airport). Flighty's Live Activities notification provides even more information in numerical and graphical format, including a countdown timer until gate arrival.
Let's talk about those Live Activities notifications from Flighty. They are amazing. If you have an older iPhone, as soon as you turn on your screen, the Live Activities notification will provide you with the key information about your flight right on your lock screen. If you are using a new iPhone 14 Pro with an always-on screen, you can clearly read that information even if the screen is dimmed. Flighty is even smart enough to put things like your next gate number in a yellow box that is obvious even on a dimmed screen.
Better yet, if you are using an iPhone 14 Pro, the Live Activities information goes into the Dynamic Island. Thus, while you are doing other things on your iPhone such as looking at email before you get on your plane, you can easily glance up and see key information such as how long before your plane leaves and the gate number. Hold down your finger on the Dynamic Island and the notification will expand to show you even more information.
I really cannot emphasize enough how useful this multitasking feature is. I love the ability to work on something else on my iPhone while always being able to glance up and see details on the upcoming flight.
It even works while you are on the plane. During your flight, you can see how long you have until you land in the Live Activities notification in the Dynamic Island. Hold down on the Dynamic Island for more information.
Live Activities also show up on your lock screen, so you can see them even if your iPhone doesn't support the Dynamic Island.
If you are connected to the plane's Wi-Fi system, this information is updated during your flight. Better yet, for airlines such as Delta, you don't even have to pay for in-flight Wi-Fi to keep Flighty up-to-date. Delta offers a free in-flight tier that lets you text message someone using the Messages app. Because that service communicates with Apple's servers, and because those same Apple servers handle app notifications, If there is a change in your flight arrival time while you are in the air, Flighty's Live Activities notifications will update as well. That's a nice feature.
It was interesting to see that both Flighty and TripIt Pro are excellent at providing updated information. If something changes about your travel such as a gate change, both Flighty and TripIt Pro provided me with the update at the same time, and they did so before—sometimes long before—the airline's own app did so.
Both apps also notify you immediately if your flight is canceled. I had originally planned to fly home from New York on December 26. On the afternoon of December 25, after I had already checked-in for my flight and gotten my boarding pass, both Flighty and TripIt Pro simultaneously told me that my flight had been canceled. In this circumstance, Delta also alerted me via text message at about the same time. However, I have had situations in the past when TripIt Pro told me several minutes before I was alerted by my airline, and that extra time can be critical when you want to be among the first to book an alternative flight. I presume that Flighty is similar to TripIt Pro in this regard because I suspect that they get their information from the same sources.
One can argue that perhaps Flighty gives you too much information in notifications. For example, two days before one of my flights, I received a notification that my airplane was still an Airbus A220-100, but a different plane with a different tail number would be used. At the time that I received that notification, that change didn't seem all that important to me. That turned out to be the flight that was cancelled, but I have no idea if the tail number change had anything to do with the cancellation less than 24-hours later.
Free vs. pay
You can use Flighty for free without paying for a Pro subscription. And if you do so, you can look up live information on flights for unlimited flights with no ads.
But you need to pay for the Pro subscription to get the standout features that make this app so special such as the amazing notifications, information on your plane's prior locations 25 hours before your flight, lock screen widgets that update live (the free version has limited refreshes), TripIt sync, email forwarding, etc. If you are looking to check out Flight, my recommendation is that you don't pay much attention to the free version and instead just pay for one month of the Pro service.
Conclusion
I was incredibly impressed by the Flighty app. It provided all of the key and latest information about my flights, just like TripIt Pro. It also provided additional information not provided by TripIt Pro, some of which you might not use, but other information that is incredibly valuable such as the past few flights of your upcoming plane. And best of all, the way that Flighty uses the iPhone's notification system is best-in-class, including the app's fantastic use of the Live Activities feature. This makes Flighty a fantastic app because the information that you need is always and quickly accessible. If you are using the iPhone, you can just glance at it. If you are not using your iPhone, just glance at the lock screen.
Flighty doesn't replace the TripIt service because it doesn't seek to manage your entire itinerary. But it does replace many of the best features of the TripIt Pro service. If it wasn't for the fact that I already have a paid TripIt Pro yearly subscription, I would seriously consider using the free TripIt service and then paying for a monthly subscription to Flighty only during the months that I am traveling.
Having said that, it seems obvious that TripIt could update its TripIt Pro service to match the superior notification features provided by Flighty. I hope that it does so soon. For now, however, Flighty is the app that I recommend using for the best flight notifications on your iPhone.
Click here to get Flighty (free, but in-app purchase to enable Flighty Pro features).
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