This is a great site – Tripit
I had never heard of Tripit, but saw on my Linked In updates that a couple of peopel I knew were using it, and beign curious I checked it out.
This is one of the most useful websites I have experienced. It basically allows you to enter in details of a trip, and it produces an itinerary that you can not just print, but share with family and friends.
You can also have it automatically place into your calendar all the major events.
But that isn’t what is so cool. It is the user interface.
Even entering in flights manually is easy. Just need the airline code and flight number and the date. It then looks up (for every airline in the world) the departure and arrival times, the type of aircraft, a seating plan for the aircraft, the terminal you leave from etc etc.
But even that is nothing compared to the e-mail interface. Just e-mail your airline tickets confirmation e-mail to their e-mail address, and they automatically add it to your trip schedule.
And you can do the same with your hotel booking confirmation. One e-mail, and they list your hotel, its address, when you can check in and check out, what room size you have.
Forward to Tripit a dozen of your confirmation e-mails, and bang your multi-week itinerary is put together.
It is also smart. It adjusts your check in time to take account of your flights. You can also add on things like rail or rental car bookings, tour packages etc. They have interfaces to over 500 tourism companies.
They also automatically generate local maps, including routes between airports and hotels etc.
This will save me heaps of time planning future trips. It just brings all your travel arrangements together in one place, and of course you can then access them on your iPhone or Blackberry also.
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:06 am
Thanks DPF
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:20 am
Looks cool, but why is it better than my travel agent who does all this for me anyway?
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:46 am
Because I like to choose my own trips and accommodation and tours.
November 2nd, 2009 at 12:08 pm
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November 2nd, 2009 at 12:08 pm
In some instances I’m not sure it would be good security for me to put onto a website where I’m going. I don’t really like telling people beforehand that I’m off to do a spot of covert work in a wildlife smuggling hotspot.
[DPF: You can choose to have your trips private]
November 2nd, 2009 at 12:14 pm
And – if you add your contacts and they use it you can see quickly and easily that they are going to be in Hong Kong say 2 of the days you are there.
November 2nd, 2009 at 10:26 pm
shame it doesn’t support jetstar or pacific blue. i tend to use all airlines about equally depending on who is cheapest, but it is a pain to have to put stuff in manually when you see how easily it takes the air NZ emails.
November 4th, 2009 at 4:51 am
It is good. I’ve been using it over the last few months to plan a somewhat busy 5 week business trip across the US, and it has worked very well. Understands timezones, can email it most flight, rental car and even hotel bookings and it is pretty good at translating them to its internal storage. You can export your itinerary in pdf and ical (so you can dump in a calendar) formats, and there is also an iPhone app available that allows you to sync itineraries to TripIt on the iPhone. All for free. Oh, another nice feature is sharing itineraries, so I’ve started using to for planning boys trips to Australia
Of course I keep most of the trips private, and just share with either my contacts on TripIt, or specific people. I’m past the point of trusting travel agents to more complex flight arrangements – after continual cockups…
November 4th, 2009 at 9:31 pm
this sounds fabulous – just need the time off to put it thru its paces – will revert for feedback before we venture abroad again. maybe that will be the trigger that swaps my beloved palm for a iphone.