As a very frequent traveler, one tedious task besides packing and living out of the suitcase is actually planning out the trip, booking the airline, hotel and car reservations as well as booking all the activities around the trip whether it is a tradeshow or conference, meetings or restaurant reservations, it seems like there is hardly any time to sit down and plan out. But my life has been much easier since I discovered Tripit.com.
This is a great service that automatically organizes all your travel plans and best of all, it’s free. All you do is e-mail Tripit.com with your itinerary and it automatically organizes everything for you. It’s stress free and you don’t have to do (hardly) a thing, with Tripit.com you can:
- Quickly organize your vacation and business travel – no matter where you book
- Automatically get itineraries with all your plans, weather, maps, restaurants and more
- Easily access your itineraries via paper, email, personal calendar or mobile device
- Share your trips and travel calendars with friends, family and fellow travelers
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The idea is that you are able to dump all of your travel details (electronic tickets, car rental bookings, hotel reservations and so on) straight from any reservation site into a central repository, which TripIt runs. The service will group the data appropriately and annotate the result with weather forecasts, driving directions, restaurant recommendations and even the travel plans of friends and family. It will then send the results back to the you —or, in the case of the driving directions, directly to the your car’s navigation device. Cool !!!
Another positive thing about Tripit.com is the fact that you will have tons of information readily available by connecting and incorporating into your schedule these and many more services:
- Google maps, for driving directions and local search services
- NOAA weather, for updated national weather
- SeatGuru, for requesting your seating arrangements on a commercial flight
- Wikipedia, for great destination information
- Eventful, for what is currently happening in the destination you are traveling to
- Flickr, for keeping your trip pictures updated at all times
- OpenTable for booking your dining reservations online
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Because of the fact that it works with these other services means that you always have a map at your convenience in case you get lost as well up to date weather information. The website itself is easy to navigate with a friendly user interface that even the most technologically impaired people will still be able to use with ease.
I am even more excited about this service today because they have announced that they getting more social with new location-based social ”Closeness” alerts.
“Who’s Close To Me?” automatically notifies users if their travel plans overlap with fellow travelers while on the road, and “Who’s Coming to my City?” automatically identifies colleagues who will be visiting the users hometown when they’re not traveling. Tripit.com claims that the new features “offer a unique social network for travelers and their community of contacts.” The ability to connect with other travelers is a nice addition to what is already a good service. This new feature provides a better way for Frequent travelers to keep up to date when they “don’t have the extra time to keep track of their travel as well as the travel schedules of their friends, family and associates.”
The free service has been recommended and reviewed on very reputable websites and publications like:
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As a frequent traveler, I definitely recommend
