TripIt – Your Personal Travel Assistant
Everyone here knows how many different confirmation codes, tour confirmations, restaurant recommendations, etc. that each trip contains. For my upcoming trip to Paris I will have two different flight confirmation codes, a hotel confirmation (really need to make this), 4 different tours, at least ten different restaurants that have been recommended by friends and family, about a million different sites to see, and more. TripIt promises to take all of that information and organize it into a Trip Report that spells everything out for you.
Probably the best feature of TripIt is that you can have it do the annoying stuff for you. Whenever you get a confirmation email about a portion of your trip, simply forward it to TripIt (plans@tripit.com) and it should be able to organize all the details into a page as part of your Trip Report. I tested this feature out with my flight reservation to Paris and I was blown away. It tells you all the information that you need to know as well as offers seat advice to help you get the best seat possible. It uses the Seat Expert database, which is a similar service to SeatGuru. It will automatically take you to the relevant seating map so you don’t even have to worry about finding the correct one! I’m assuming it does very similar things with other reservations such as hotels and cars, but I didn’t have any handy to test it with. If they work as well as the flight feature, they’ll be quite impressive.
Once all of your reservations and plans are added, TripIt provides you with an itinerary and map with all of the relevant information so that you can easily see everything that you have planned. To make sure that you can keep track of everything on the go, TripIt has several mobile apps (not only iOS and Android, but also Windows Phone, and BlackBerry) that you can use to see your itinerary on the go. The iPhone version that I used was quite polished and easy to use and I imagine will come in useful for busy days on trips.
TripIt also offers a “Pro” version of its service that offers slightly better service for $49/year. With your membership, however, you also get complimentary Hertz #1 Club Gold and Regus Gold memberships. The Pro membership can also track all of your point balances in a similar fashion to AwardWallet. The biggest reason to sign up for the Pro service, though, is probably because of its offer to help you with delays, cancellations, and gate changes. It automatically alerts you to those things as well as helps you find alternative routes.
Overall, I really like what TripIt has to offer and have complete faith that it will get even better as it continues to evolve and grow. Well done, TripIt!
Deal of the Day
For today’s Deal of the Day FlyerTalk is giving away A FlyerTalk Luggage Tag & Hoodie combo for the best overall travel deal submitted. A great mileage run, mistake fare, partner promo, new card sign-up offer, or the special twist you figured out on a deal today. Add it to the comments section of this post (with your First Name, Last Initial, and 3 letter airport code) or this afternoon’s Deal of the Day post to be eligible to win.
