There was a time when most vacations were booked through a travel agent who would dutifully provide you with a nice printed itinerary of your trip. Today, we tend to book our own trips, sometimes using multiple on-line sites, so the burden is on us to gather up an itinerary. In planning my latest trip to Spain I found myself collecting printed confirmations and ended up with a folder the size of a small book. It was heavy, large, and was almost sure to get lost before the end of the trip. What to do?
I remembered TripIt! This is a web service that comes in a free and premium version. The idea is that, for starters, you enter the activities of your trip and TripIt consolidates them into a single document that can be printed or viewed on the web. You can access the service by computer or mobile app.
TripIt uses some Internet magic to make it easy to use. Rather than entering every single confirmation number, hotel, flight, and address, in most cases you can just forward the confirmatory email to a special address they give you and TripIt automatically plugs it into your itinerary. This was a huge time-saver for me. With the exception of one or two hotels that didn't send emails all my travel plans were entered in with little or no effort from me.
By the way, it isn't just about airplanes and hotels. TripIt can organize rail travel, rental cars, and tickets for events, as well as meetings, maps, directions and more.
Another cool feature is that TripIt can send your info directly to Google calendars. My only complaint there is that you get one over-arching calendar event that spans all the days of a particular itinerary. I would have preferred the calendar to show the city I was in at the top of each calendar day.
A couple of things you do need to be careful about are the arrival and departure times. This is what the app uses to create the order of your trip. So, if you're manually entering reminders to visit certain sites, you'll want to give approximate times to keep things in the correct order.
I loved that TripIt automatically gave the expected weather for every day of my trip and was able to pull in other details, like maps to the hotel.
Whether you need the premium service depends on the nature of your travel. It seemed to me that $49.99 was a bit steep for the benefits offered: a consolidated page to view your various frequent flier/loyalty point programs, real-time alerts about delays, cancellations and gate changes, seat tracking, sharing of itineraries with your "inner circle", whether you're entitled to a refund if there are better prices than what you paid, less any rebooking fees.
I think you'll find the TripIt service a valuable way to organize your vacation. Putting in the time to get your travel plans all in one place more than paid off for me.
