One of our favorite travel tools is TripIt.  TripIt is a web site (with associated mobile apps) that gathers details of your travel, including hotel reservations, airline tickets, cruise itineraries, rental cars, and other travel information.  TripIt then presents you with a comprehensive itinerary in a simplified format that allows you to easily view the information.

TripIt has a few ways to gather this information.  The method that we prefer is to forward the confirmation emails we receive to plans@tripit.com.  Part of the setup of your TripIt account includes listing the email addresses you have.  When you forward your confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com, it uses the “from” portion of the email to detect that is coming from you and places the information into one of your “trips.” (If you don’t have a trip for that time period, it will create one for you.)  The second method is to allow TripIt access to your email, where it will scan your inbox for incoming messages.  This is more of an automated method.  Another way is to allow your loyalty program to forward information directly to TripIt.  IHG is one of the participating loyalty programs.

TripIt has two kinds of accounts, free and pro. The free one will create itineraries for you, allow mobile access, allow you to edit your plans, sync to your calendar, and allow you to share your plans.  The paid version ($49 a year) does all of the above plus gives you real-time flight alerts, locates alternate flights, does seat location alerts, scans for possible airfare savings, and organizes your loyalty points.  We started with the free TripIt accounts, but have since upgraded to paid accounts because we like the additional features.

The features we like the most are the sharing of plans, especially with each other.  Each user can take on the role of traveler, viewer, or planner on a trip.  TripIt allows us to share information on trips that we take together and keeps us informed about the logistics for trips we aren’t taking together, mostly work related trips.  We no longer need to forward emails to each other when a work trip comes up.  The real-time flight alerts are also great, often letting us know about a problem before the airline does.  The seat location alerts, airfare savings, and loyalty point organization features don’t get used very much by us.

I realize this might sound like a commercial, but we aren’t receiving anything for this post.  We are just loyal TripIt users (we’ve had the pro service for three years now).  It helps us keep our travel plans in one place with easy access on both a computer and on our iPhones/iPads.  I suggest starting with the free version to see if it meets your needs. 

 

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