I tried Samsung Wallet's new Trips feature, and it puts Google Wallet to shame

Digital wallets have already swallowed our IDs, credit cards, loyalty cards, and transit passes. But after the trip starts, the experience still feels more collected than connected.

Google and Apple have both made travel easier in pieces, but neither has turned the wallet into a true trip hub yet.

Samsung is trying something different here, and its competitors should probably be paying attention.

In late April, Samsung started rolling out Trips for its Wallet users in the US, the UK, and South Korea, giving the app a more practical role during travel.

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By  Yasmine Crossland

Samsung found a better way to make sense of saved travel passes

Before this update, saving a flight ticket to your phone meant adding another card to an endless vertical stack.

Trips changes that by grouping eligible flights, hotel bookings, car rentals, transit tickets, and event passes into a timeline based on when and where they happen.

Your Friday morning flight sits above your Friday afternoon hotel reservation. Your Saturday museum tickets come next. Theme park passes and travel events populate the same timeline.

Trips also covers the bits Samsung may not catch automatically. You can add items manually and attach notes to your bookings.

Need to remember a rental gate code or a confirmation number? Type it next to the relevant booking. That's the difference between collecting travel cards and organizing a trip.

Google already has the pieces, but Samsung has the timeline

Now let's look at Google Wallet. To be fair, Google has added useful travel mechanics recently.

On Android 16, Live Updates can bring flight progress and timing information to the lock screen. Google Wallet can also notify users of saved pass updates and pull information from Gmail automatically.

Both are really helpful, but they still don't quite solve the same problem Samsung is targeting.

Google Wallet tracks individual items without understanding the surrounding journey, and when you land at the airport, the last thing you want is to be app-hopping.

The best travel app may already be your phone's wallet

You might ask why this belongs in the OS-level wallet, given that third-party travel planners already exist. The answer is flow.

Your phone is already unlocked, and your wallet is already open. Closing it to jump into a separate travel app to check what comes next adds unnecessary friction.

There's a security argument, too. Samsung backed Trips with Samsung Knox, using encryption and biometric authentication. Travel plans contain sensitive location data.

Storing them inside an app already designed for sensitive payments and identity data makes more sense than spreading them across yet another travel app with a separate privacy model.

Google has all the ingredients for a better version of Trips

The execution behind the scenes is impressive. For partners already issuing compatible Samsung Wallet content, Samsung pitches Trips as a zero-effort integration.

Compatible partner platforms don't have to rewrite code or implement new APIs for their passes to appear in Trips.

The wallet reads what's already there and gives it context. Which means Google has no excuse.

Google already has the strongest data graph on the planet. Google Wallet can pull booking confirmations from Gmail, Google Calendar tracks your schedule, and Google Maps knows where you need to go.

The raw material for an even better automated timeline is sitting right there. Google only needs to organize it inside the wallet.

Anyone who traveled heavily a few years back remembers the standalone Google Trips app, which parsed your Gmail to build chronological itineraries.

Trips died in August 2019, and its features were absorbed into other Google services. Samsung has now proven the concept still works, as long as you put it in the right app.

The real prize is a wallet that can fix your trip in real time

Organizing travel details into a timeline is a strong first move, but I'm more interested in seeing where this could go next.

Itinerary data is useful on its own, yet it can become much better if it can feed into AI agents like Gemini Spark.

Today, your wallet stores boarding passes and bookings. Eventually, it could understand how those pieces connect.

If your flight is delayed, an AI-powered travel wallet could realize you'll miss your train, suggest the next route, draft a late check-in message to your hotel, or help adjust your bookings before the delay ruins the rest of your trip.

Whoever makes this work first could turn the travel wallet into a serious ecosystem lock-in tool, especially for people who fly often.