Trail Wallet app review: a digital spending overview by travelers for travelers 2021

Introduction

Trail Wallet by Voyage Travel Apps has been created by a couple of travelers that have been on the road for a while. Every day, you are supposed to use this travel spending app to fill in what you spent your money on while traveling.

On first sight this seems like a very handy iPhone app for travel expenses, but when using it, I stumbled over some annoying and irritating nuisances, which I will come to in a bit. 

Check out our Trail Wallet app review for more details and let us know if you think it's one of the best travel apps for iPhone. 
 

Overspend, underspend, pie charts and history

We traveled throughout South America for over 9 months and we decided to buy and use this app, as the description on the App Store made it sound like it was exactly what we needed. You can add different costs on the day itself and this way see if you’re under or over budget.

You can go to the “Chart” tab and see a pie chart of what you’ve been spending. On the history screen, you can see exactly what you have been spending, what you've been spending on, and if you remained within budget one day and overspent the next.

You can add your local currency and your currency that you are used to, which then calculates all the exchange rates for you. All very handy, but allow me to let you know what grinded my gears.

Important missing features

First of all, when you’re out traveling, you might not always have your iPad or iPhone with you. Which means that you cannot open your app and add costs when you spend your money.

The point I’m trying is that it’s really annoying if you want to keep a good overview of your spending behavior, you need to be able to add costs to the day you spent it on. Regrettably, the app does not allow this, so when you remember about the taxi you took yesterday, or a bottle of coke you had, it needs to go on today.

The app has a very limited amount of set categories, namely Accommodation, Food, Transport, Entertainment, Bribes and Miscellaneous. You read that right, bribes!

We never had to bribe anyone in our 10 months of traveling! The most annoying part is that you can’t add any categories. So you’re stuck with ones that might not necessarily make any sense to you.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• Spending breakdowns
• History screen
• Converts currency for you

Cons

• Very basic looking
• No possibility to add costs to previous days
• No possibility to add categories

Conclusion

Until this app, which is designed for iPhone,  gets a nice update, I would recommend against this app. The features are just not there yet and some simple additions to the feature set would make this app so much better.

As I said before, I reverted back to the old school way of budgeting with my pen and black book. That way at least I can go back at any time and add my own categories.