Magic helpers

Every sparkle in the app opens magic helpers. They are the features that go and fetch something for you: a hotel's address and photos, a flight number turned into a full itinerary item, a forecast for the week you are there, a whole plan worked out in a conversation.

They lean on outside services to do it, Google, Gemini, MET Norway and a few more, so they are off by default. Turn on Magic helpers at Settings› Privacy› Magic helpers and the sparkles appear.

Next to the toggle there is an that lists every helper and who powers it. And further down, Settings› About› Third-party services names every outside service the app uses and what it is there for.

On Up next

Next› Add panel

The button at the top right of your home screen. It wears a sparkle when Magic helpers are on and a clock when they are off, and it disappears once you have added everything it offers.

• Forecast puts a weather panel for any city on the screen. It comes from MET Norway, through our server, which sends the coordinates and nothing else. The panel is fetched fresh every time you open it, never stored.
• Time puts a clock for any city there. Nothing is fetched for this one, so it works with Magic helpers off too.

On a trip, Details tab

Trip› Details› Magic helpers

The sparkle sits in the trip's header, and it holds what the tab you are on can do.

• Forecast attaches the same weather panel to the trip itself, once the trip has a location. Same source, same rule: the trip remembers which place you asked about and never the numbers.

On a trip, Itinerary tab

Trip› Itinerary› Magic helpers

Same sparkle, different tab, and this is where the two big ones live.

• Plan itinerary opens a screen of its own: the conversation in one pane, the trip's own days in the other, and a divider you can drag to give either of them more room. You talk about the trip rather than about one item. Each idea comes back as something you accept or leave, what you accept drops into a staged list beside your real items where you can retime it, edit it or throw it out, and nothing reaches the trip until you press Apply.
• Suggest activity is the short version. Say what you are after, "a cozy dinner near the hotel", "a museum and a park in the same afternoon", and a handful of real places come back. Tick the ones you like and they land as ordinary trip items with photos, address and rating attached. Your past prompts stay with the trip, so you can come back later and take one of the others.

Both run on Google Gemini, grounded in Google Maps places, which is what lets a suggestion arrive as a real place rather than a name to go and find. The trip's title, country, dates, location and the titles of what is already on it go with the prompt. You get thirty prompts an hour, counted across both.

On the Add button in the itinerary

Trip› Itinerary› Add› Magic helpers

Add makes an empty item. The sparkle beside it starts one from something that already exists.

• Look up a place finds hotels, landmarks and restaurants through Google Places and pulls the address, photos and rating in with one tap. Only the place id is kept, per Google's terms, and everything else is refetched when you look at it.
• Look up a flight takes a flight number and a date and comes back with the airline, the airports, the times, the terminal and gate, the aircraft and a photo of the type. The schedule is AeroDataBox and is never stored. The airport details and the aircraft photo come from snapshots of OurAirports and Wikidata that ship inside the app, so no extra call is made for them.
• Paste a URL reads a link and fills the item out from it.

Google Maps shares, Apple Maps links, Booking.com rooms, Hotels.com pages, OpenStreetMap links, what3words addresses and plain geo: points all arrive with a title and a location on them. Anything else still works: you get the site's name as the title and the link kept on the item. The browser extension and the bookmarklet feed the same thing, so a link can go from a tab on your desktop into a trip without the phone.

Inside a trip item

Trip item› Add details› Magic helpers

Open any item, tap Add details, and the same helpers are there: Look up a place, Look up a flight, Add forecast and Paste a URL. On a new item the ones you reach for most also sit as small pills next to the field they fill.

Below them is a second group called Manual actions, which is exactly what it says. Enter flight route lets you pick the two airports yourself from the list that ships with the app. Nothing is looked up, and it is there whether Magic helpers are on or off.

Where a helper works without a sparkle

Three of them are not in a menu at all. They are just what that part of the app does once helpers are on.

• Search on Google, in the location picker, appears when the bundled city list does not have what you are looking for. It resolves a full address to a point through Google's geocoder, and only when you tap it, never while you type.
• The map button on a trip plots every located item on a real map, which you can narrow to one kind of item or one day. The map document is built by our server and the key never leaves it.
• Live location previews turn the small map inside an item into one you can pan and zoom. With helpers off you still get a preview, drawn from the world map bundled with the app, with nobody else involved.

Not everything under a sparkle is magic

Three of these reach out to nobody, or reach out and do nothing clever with the answer.

• Time is arithmetic on your own device. It asks nobody anything.
• Enter flight route is you typing in two airports. It sits under Manual actions for that reason.
• Forecast does reach out, but there is nothing clever in it. It is a weather lookup for a place you picked.

What the app is like with them off

It is the same app. What changes:

• Locations come from the world map with a drag pin, and from the city list that ships with the app.
• An item's location preview is the bundled map, with no third party in it.
• The map button on a trip is not there.
• Time still works, and so does Enter flight route.

Turn them back on in the same place, and every trip you already made stays exactly as it was.