Why I built Pelgrim
11 September 2026 · by Jorg
I have 317 flights, 244 hotel stays and 98 trips in one database, going back to 2014. That did not start as a product. It started because no single tool would hold it.
The first was TripIt, on the free tier, for years. When SAP Concur acquired it I ended up with a Pro subscription I had not paid for, and I liked it. It parsed my confirmations, it kept my itineraries straight, and for the thing it does it is still good. What it would not tell me was anything about the shape of twelve years. Where had I actually been. What was I repeating. What had changed.
So I added my.flightradar24.com, which visualizes a flying life beautifully and is the one I could show other people without explaining anything. It is also flights, only ever flights. Half of my travel is a hotel room in a city I flew to, and that half was invisible.
OpenFlights came next and got further. It still could not hold everything I wanted to put in it.
Then LogYourFlight and LogYourStay arrived and came closest of anything I tried. You can see the shape of the problem in the names: one for flights, one for stays. That is a reasonable way to build software and it was not what I needed, because the questions I cared about only exist where the two meet. How many nights did that route cost me. Which trips earned nothing. What am I actually doing with my year.
Four tools, four pools, and the answers living in the gaps between them.
The second half took longer to see, and it is the part I would now put first. A travel record that only looks backwards is a scrapbook. What I wanted it to do was tell me what was still on the table in front of me.
Here is today, from my own record. My Flying Blue account sits one XP short of a milestone. One. My KrisFlyer balance is 434 Elite miles short of the next rung. I hold Marriott Lifetime Platinum, so my status does not requalify and every article about earning status is written for somebody else; the thing still worth chasing is a nightly-upgrade milestone thirty-nine nights out.
How far through this qualifying period I am toward the next milestone in each programme. The units are not comparable, so the bar is a proportion and the real figure sits beside it.
| Programme | Progress | Milestone | Still needed | What it pays |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flying Blue | 449 XP | 450 XP | 1 XP | A choice benefit |
| KrisFlyer | 29,566 Elite miles | 30,000 | 434 Elite miles | The next rung |
| Marriott Bonvoy | 11 nights | 50 nights | 39 nights | 5 Nightly Upgrade Awards |
None of that is hidden. It is sitting in three separate programmes, each of which will happily show me a balance and none of which will tell me that a single segment closes a gap, or that a certificate is going to expire unused, or which of the two hotels I was choosing between makes the year work.
That is the thing I could not buy. When we mapped the field this July, we counted fourteen travel-logging products. Exactly one of them tracks loyalty at all.
So that is what Pelgrim is: one pool instead of four, and a record that faces forwards as well as back. Everything we have built follows from that. The map and the calendar, so twelve years is something you can look at rather than query. A browser extension that reads your rewards pages in your own browser, because the alternative in this market is handing over your airline password and I was not going to do that or ask anyone else to. An AI connector, so you can ask your own travel history a question in plain language. Real share links, because some of this is worth showing people.
And the forward half, which is where the work is now. Expiry and threshold warnings are being built. A planner that knows what you hold. Route-to-status, so the question "what would it actually take" has an answer, is on the roadmap and not yet real. Circles, which match colleagues on overlapping trips without either of you being able to read the other's travel, shipped recently and deliberately does less than it could.
None of it is finished. That is roughly the point: I am still the person with 317 flights and one XP, and I would rather build the thing that tells me than keep checking four apps to find out.
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