These three words can be synonyms, but have slightly different connotations.
First, travel is usually a verb...
I will travel to Washington DC.
...but not always. In common speech (at least as far as I am familiar), when used as a noun, it is used in its plural form:
How were your travels?
Compared to the substantially equivalent sentences:
How was your trip?
How was your journey?
One could also ask How was your travel?, but it this would have a more specific meaning, for instance, "How was your flight from New York to L.A.?" as opposed to "How was your entire journey, and the time you spent in L.A.?"
Trip and journey are more closely interchangeable, and vary mostly in duration, distance, and formality.
A trip can be a short journey. One can take a trip to the store, but it would be unusual (except in poetic exaggeration) to take a journey to the store
A journey would often imply a longer (in terms of time and/or distance) trip, perhaps to multiple destinations, or with a greater sense of unknown. A journey may not be fully planned out ahead of time.
A business conference to Seattle would probably be described as a trip, whereas a family vacation road-trip from Nebraska, through the Colorado Rockies, camping in Nevada, then stopping in Las Vegas and returning through Oklahoma and Kansas, might be described as a journey.
Often, in colloquial English (at least in the U.S.), trip is far more commonly used than journey, even when describing long/epic travels.
Both trip and journey can also be verbs, but when used as verbs they are not interchangeable. To journey is to engage in the act of journeying:
We journeyed to the Grand Canyon.
However to trip is to cause someone to stumble or lose their balance.
She tripped the thief with her cane.
I tripped over the dog.
To trip up has the additional connotation of causing someone to blunder:
The reporter tripped up the senator.
There are also some additional cases where trip and journey cannot be interchanged in some common expressions:
- A guilt trip
- A high brought on by recreational drugs can be called a "trip."
- Trippy -- slang; reminiscent of the "trip" (high) brought on by recreational drugs; especially LSD
For the sentence you provided, "I would be grateful if you would acknowledge receipt of this letter," you could use "receiving" in place of "receipt of." "Reception," used to mean the act of receiving, has a connotation that's linked with receiving a signal on an electronic device like a phone or a TV which, if used in your context, would sound strange.
Best Answer
Historically both items of clothing originate from a piece of cloth that was wound around a rider's neck. The name stems from Croatian mercenaries. Over time, it became a fashionable item with cravats (and their dozens of ways of tying them) being one symbol of dandyism in the Regency era. This explains why the term "cravat" (-> Krawatte in German) can be found in many languages.
Over time, the cravat - a wider piece of cloth, more resembling a shawl - has "slimmed down" to a small strip of fabric and changed the name in English to "tie", denoting the act of knotting them around the wearer's neck. A special form of tie is a bow-tie. In German, there exists the equivalent term "Binder", but it has never really replaced "Krawatte".
And just for the sake of completeness: In German (and sometimes in English) a cravat could also be called a "Plastron".