Tap New trip and give it a title. That is the whole setup.
A trip has no dates until something is scheduled on it. The dates you see on the trip list are the first thing and the last thing on the itinerary, so they widen on their own as you add the flight out and the flight home. There is nowhere to type them, and that is deliberate — dates you type and dates you schedule can disagree, and then one of them is lying.
Inside a trip, Add offers four kinds:
An activity does not need an end time. Leave it off and the trip treats it as a moment rather than a block.
On a flight, type three letters into the airport field and pick from the list. That fills in the city and the time zone at that end. The time you typed does not move: enter 9:01 and then say you are leaving from London, and it is still 9:01, now known to be London time.
For travel that is not a flight, the origin and destination are the same map-backed Where field everything else uses.
Where a leg lands somewhere with ride hailing, the trip offers to open Uber — or Grab in the places Uber does not go — pointed at that destination.
Start typing in Where and results come back from Apple Maps. Tap one and the place is pinned: the app knows exactly where it is, so it can open it in Maps later.
Typing over the name un-pins it. If you edit the text of a place you picked, the app drops the pin and keeps your words. This is on purpose — once you have changed the name, the app can no longer promise the coordinates still describe what it says. Pick from the list again to re-pin it.
You never have to pick from the list. Type the name of the place a friend recommended, which the map has never heard of, and it works the same way. It just will not have an "open in Maps" to offer.
Times you type are local to wherever the trip's travel puts you at that moment. Set dinner for seven on the 4th, then book a flight to Taipei on the 3rd, and dinner is still at seven — seven in Taipei, because that is where you will be standing.
An entry with no time zone of its own follows your travel. That is the default, and for most things it is what you want. Nothing on the entry says so, because there is nothing to say: not choosing is the setting.
When you do need to pin one down, open the time zone row and pick a city. From then on that entry stays put no matter what travel you add around it. To hand it back, choose Automatic — the row that says wherever your travel puts you.
You will need this rarely, and one case is worth knowing. Drive from Arizona to Nevada in winter and you cross an hour backwards in five minutes, so nine in the morning happens twice, both times while you are awake. The app cannot know which one you meant. Pick the city and it will.
Open a trip, tap Share, and choose Invite someone to edit or Invite someone to view. You get a code and a link. Send either however you like.
Whoever opens the link on an iPhone with the app installed goes straight to the trip. Anyone else sees a page with the code on it, which they can type into Join a trip on the trip list. The code is the thing that matters; the link is a convenience.
Codes are not tied to an address, so you can invite somebody whose email you do not know. Anyone holding a code can pass it on, which is the same deal as any sharing link — codes expire, and any editor can Revoke one. Revoking withdraws the code, not the people who already used it.
An editor can change the trip, share it, and take somebody off it. A viewer can read it.
A trip has no owner. Everyone editing it stands equally, which means any editor can remove any other — sharing edit rights is sharing everything. It also means the trip outlives any one person leaving.
Roles are set when you invite somebody and cannot be changed afterwards. To move somebody between editor and viewer, send them a new code with the role you want; redeeming it moves them.
Leave this trip takes your copy off your device. If you are the last person who could edit it, leaving deletes it for everyone, because there would be nobody left able to change it.
You do not have to. A trip planner that works on the plane does not need an account, and without one everything on this page works except sharing.
An account buys two things: trips that reach your other devices, and trips you can share with other people. Sign in with Google or with Apple, whichever you prefer. If you use Apple and choose Hide My Email, that is fine — invitations are codes, never addresses, so nothing here needs to know where you get mail.
If you use Apple on your phone and Google on your iPad, add the second one to the same account from the account screen rather than signing in twice. Two sign-ins make two accounts with your trips split between them.
Signing out takes your trips off the device. They are in your account and come back when you sign in. If anything has not reached the server yet, the app names those trips before it lets you go.
The account screen has Delete account. It asks you to sign in again first, then:
There is no undo. If something goes wrong partway, you stay signed in so you can try again.