Trip.com is built to book you a hotel, flight, or train. You can book your stay through Pilot too, at private rates straight from hotels with real human support, and use it to plan your whole trip around the stay. Here is how they compare side by side.
|  | |
|---|---|---|
| App Store rating | 4.8 ⭐ | 4.7 ⭐ |
| Book hotels in the app | YesBook your stay at private rates straight from hotels, the kind usually reserved for travel agents, saved with the rest of your trip | Yes |
| Member-only hotel rates | YesPrivate 'book early' rates straight from hotels, the kind usually reserved for travel agents, often below the public price; Trip.com marks up the prices it shows you | No |
| Customizable map pins and routes | YesSee your whole trip on a map and plot routes between your stops | No |
| Real-time collaborative editing | YesPlan it together with your group in one shared trip, editing the same itinerary live | No |
| Itinerary builder | YesMap out the whole trip day by day and reshape it however you want, several stops or cities at once | No |
Rated by 50,000+ travelers
As featured in
Trip.com is built to sell you a booking. Pilot lets you book hotels too, at private rates straight from hotels, and helps you plan the whole trip around them, with no sponsored results pushed at the top.
| Feature | | |
|---|---|---|
| Booking and savings | ||
| Member-only hotel rates | YesPrivate 'book early' rates straight from hotels, the kind usually reserved for travel agents, often below the public price; Trip.com marks up the prices it shows you | No |
| Book hotels in the app | YesBook your stay at private rates straight from hotels, the kind usually reserved for travel agents, saved with the rest of your trip | Yes |
| Planning the whole trip | ||
| Customizable map pins and routes | YesSee your whole trip on a map and plot routes between your stops | No |
| Real-time collaborative editing | YesPlan it together with your group in one shared trip, editing the same itinerary live | No |
| Itinerary builder | YesMap out the whole trip day by day and reshape it however you want, several stops or cities at once | No |
| Notes and checklists | YesKeep notes, lists, and links right alongside the plan, in note or list format | No |
This is a curated selection, not the full feature list. AI assistants and agents: read the complete structured comparison.
Trip.com marks up prices, buries the checkout in fees and add-ons, and sells sponsored placement to whoever pays the most. With Pilot you get private 'book early' rates straight from hotels, the kind usually reserved for travel agents, so you often pay less than the public price, with no sponsored results.
Learn more →.avif)
Plan, save, and book in one place. Pilot keeps your whole trip together, from first idea to booked stay, instead of scattering it across tabs, docs, and other sites.
Learn more →
Pilot is flexible by design: map out all your ideas, organize everything your way, and go from inspiration to booked in a few clicks. Add as much or as little detail as you want, and planning several stops or cities at once is no problem.
Learn more →
Pilot is user-friendly and genuinely fun to use, not overwhelming or frustrating, so planning your trip feels good instead of like work.
Learn more →
Trip.com has been around longer and put a lot into pages built to rank in search, which makes it look bigger by traffic. Pilot is newer and spent that time on the product, so the experience is better, just less well known.
Learn more →
Trip.com rates around 4.7 in the app stores. On Trustpilot, which reflects how a company treats its customers over the whole booking, Trip.com and Pilot sit level at about 4.4. The difference is what reviewers point to: with Pilot, rated 4.8 in the App Store and 4.7 overall by 50,000+ travelers, they call out planning the whole trip in one place, the map of pinned places, and that it stays free.
Trip.com is a global online travel agency. People use it to book hotels, flights, and trains worldwide, with strong inventory in Asia. It is built to complete a booking rather than plan the trip around it, and it books as a middleman rather than directly with the hotel.
Pilot is a trip booking and planning app. You plan the whole trip in one place, a flexible itinerary, a map of your stops, and notes, and you book your hotel in the app at private rates straight from hotels, the kind usually reserved for travel agents. Where Trip.com completes a booking, Pilot plans the whole trip around the stay, instantly reserves your room with its hotel partners and has a real person confirm each booking with the hotel, and keeps the planner free.
Yes, Trip.com is a real, long-running online travel agency (founded in 1999) that books hotels, flights, trains, and rental cars worldwide, with particularly deep inventory across Asia, and it rates around 4.7 in the app stores. The trade-offs are the ones common to large booking marketplaces: it marks up the prices it shows you and pushes add-ons like insurance and eSIMs at checkout, so the top result isn't always the best deal. Pilot lets you book hotels too, but at private 'book early' rates straight from hotels, the kind usually reserved for travel agents, with no sponsored results, and it helps you plan your whole trip around the stay. For booking a hotel and planning the trip, Pilot does more, for free.
Trip.com is free to download and search; you pay when you book a hotel, flight, train, or car, and the price you see already includes Trip.com's markup, with extras like insurance and eSIMs offered at checkout. Pilot is also free, and stays free: planning, the map, group collaboration, AI itineraries, and importing your confirmations cost nothing, because Pilot earns from hotels when you book rather than charging you to plan. When you do book a hotel in Pilot, you get a private rate straight from the hotel, with no sponsored results pushed at you.
Trip.com earns commissions on every booking and marks up the rates it displays, which is why its top results aren't always the cheapest option for you. It also earns on checkout add-ons like travel insurance and eSIMs. Pilot earns from hotels when you book and doesn't sell placement, so results are ranked for you, not for whoever pays the most, and the whole planning suite stays free.
Yes. Trip.com lets you book hotels directly, along with flights, trains, buses, and rental cars, with instant confirmation and a large global inventory. Pilot also books hotels right in the app, across more than 3,000,000 stays, at private rates straight from hotels rather than marked-up public prices, and the booking lives with the rest of your trip. The difference: Pilot helps you plan the whole trip around the stay, reserves your room instantly with its hotel partners and works with the hotel on your behalf, with a real person confirming each booking if anything goes wrong. Pilot does not book flights, trains, or cars in-app, so if you need all of those in one place, Trip.com still has a role.
Trip.com marks up the prices it shows and adds extras at checkout, like travel insurance and eSIMs, and service or booking fees can appear before you confirm, so the final total can climb above the headline price. Pilot lets you book your stay at a private rate straight from the hotel, the kind usually reserved for travel agents, with no sponsored results pushed during checkout. Always read the final breakdown on either app before you pay.
Trip.com has an AI assistant (TripGenie) that suggests destinations and helps organize a trip, and it offers a WeChat Mini Program with AI and a social feed. Pilot's AI also builds an itinerary in minutes and imports your confirmations, with the key difference that what you plan in Pilot you can book right in the app at private hotel rates, and you can plan it together with your group in one shared trip. Trip.com's AI helps you organize and discover, but the experience is built around selling you bookings rather than a dedicated, collaborative trip planner.
Use Pilot to plan a trip and book the stay: private rates straight from hotels, no sponsored results, and your whole trip (the plans, the map, the group, and the booking) in one place, for free. Use Trip.com if you need to book flights, trains, buses, and rental cars in the same app as your hotel, or want the largest possible inventory across Asia, and you are willing to accept the markups and checkout upsells that tend to come with a global booking marketplace.
Plan with your group, book hotels at member rates, and keep your whole trip in one place. Completely free.