Use case
Passports, check-in, and the thing you always forget
Airlines give you a 24-hour window and expect you to be awake for it. Check-in opened while you were asleep in a different time zone, and closed before the alarm you had set for something else.
Travel goes wrong on a schedule that is not yours and in a time zone you are not in.
Which is why the two things that matter are how early the warning comes and whether it can reach a phone that is somewhere else.
A trip runs on three different clocks
The first clock runs in months. Passport validity, visas, the vaccination that needs two doses eight weeks apart, the travel insurance that expired quietly last year. These fail long before you pack, and they fail silently.
The second runs in days. Booking the transfer, ordering currency, arranging who feeds the cat, printing the one document that still has to be paper. Everybody knows about these and everybody does them the night before.
The third runs in hours and belongs to somebody else entirely: the check-in window, the bag drop cut-off, the gate. You do not set these times. You just have to be awake for them, often in a country whose morning is your middle of the night.
One reminder app can hold all three, but only if you set them as three separate kinds of reminder rather than as one undifferentiated pile of things to do before a holiday.
The four that actually catch people
The passport with five months left on it
Plenty of countries want six. You find out at a check-in desk, which is the single worst place to find out anything, and there is no version of the story where you still take the flight.
Check-in that opened at 03:00 your time
Twenty-four hours before departure, and departure is at 06:00 somewhere else. By the time you wake up the aisle seats are gone and so is any chance of sitting with the people you are travelling with.
The thing that lives in the charger drawer
The adapter, the medication, the charger for the thing that only has one charger. Packing reminders always arrive when you are already at the station, because that is when you start thinking about what you brought.
The return leg nobody set anything for
The outbound had a week of preparation behind it. The return has a check-in window too, and you are now in a hotel, off your routine, with a phone on hotel wifi.
The long-lead list, set once a year
- Passport expiry, as a yearly reminder set nine months before the actual date, because renewal takes weeks and six months of validity is often required
- Any visa or travel authorisation, with its own expiry
- Travel insurance renewal, set a month before it lapses so you can compare rather than auto-renew
- Driving licence and any international permit
- Vaccinations or medication that needs a course started weeks ahead
- Loyalty or travel cards that expire, which is a small annoyance rather than a disaster, but is free to prevent
A packing list should ring as one thing
A Bucket is a list reminder: you build it by searching a catalogue and tapping items rather than typing each one, they group by category, and the whole list rings as a single reminder with its own date, time and tone.
For packing that is the right shape. One reminder the evening before, one list attached, and the list comes back for the next trip instead of being rebuilt in a panic. The search works in English, Hinglish and Hindi, and items keep the name in the language you chose.
Time it to fire at home. A packing reminder that arrives while you are already on the train is not a reminder, it is a running commentary on what you forgot.
- Build the list by tapping items, not typing them
- Search in English, Hinglish or Hindi
- The whole list rings as one reminder, at a time you set
The parts a trip uses
A call for the check-in window
A real phone call placed to your verified number reaches a locked phone in a hotel room. It is the one channel that does not need the app open, the screen on, or you to be in the same room as a laptop.
Pre-alarm
Eight preset offsets up to 5 hours, stackable. Five hours before a bag drop is the difference between leaving and running.
Bucket lists
The packing list, the documents list, the things to buy before you go. One reminder each, reusable next trip.
Place reminders
Fire when you leave the house or when you arrive somewhere. Good for the passport by the door and the duty-free pickup on the way back.
Picture reminders
Photograph the booking reference, the insurance number and the passport page, and attach them to the reminder they belong to.
Yearly repeats
Expiries come round. Set them to repeat yearly with Repeat ends set to never, and they warn you every year without maintenance.
Timelee does not watch your flight
There is no airline connection, no booking import and no flight tracking of any kind. Timelee does not know your flight number, and it will not tell you about a delay or a gate change. What it does is ring at times you set, and reach you loudly when it does. Set the check-in window yourself, from the confirmation email, at the moment you book.
Set the check-in window the day you book
Sign in with Google, put the 24-hour window in with a pre-alarm, and give it a delivery that works on a phone in a hotel room.