TripIt

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.  (Note: some information on these screen shots is hidden, so they may look a little strange)

 

Features

TripIt has two kinds of accounts, free and pro. The free one will create itineraries for you, provide mobile access, allow you to edit your plans, sync to your calendar, and enable you to share your plans with others.  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.

This is how one of your trips would show up on your Google calendar. 

We also will “print” the itinerary to share with people that aren’t traveling with us.  You can choose to limit the boarding details (price, fare class, etc) so they just have the specific information they need (times, dates, and locations).  You can also print a more full featured itinerary for yourself as a backup.

One feature we like the most is 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.

The travel alerts you get with the pro version keep you informed about delays well before the airline even notifies you.  One perfect example of this was on a recent trip back from Puerto Rico.  We had a connection at JFK.  TripIt told us there would be a two hour delay for our segment from JFK to DCA.  American Airlines boarded our flight normally, then told us once we were on board that we were waiting for a flight crew to come in.  We were delayed waiting on that flight crew for exactly two hours, despite American Airlines telling us the flight crew would be arriving shortly.

Here are some of the alerts you can set up, via email or text messages:

Itinerary

TripIt has a few ways to gather information about your trips.  The method we prefer is to forward our confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com.  TripIt is able to parse the format that most major travel companies use, including airlines, hotels, cruise, and rental cars.  We have sent in emails from all of the parts of the Walt Disney Travel Company, including ones from Walt Disney World for travel packages, dining reservation emails, Disneyland emails, Aulani reservations, and Disney Cruise Line itineraries.  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 yet have a trip for that time period, it will create one for you.)  Part of the setup of your TripIt account includes listing the email addresses you have.  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 that allows this.  You can also just go into TripIt and add the information manually.

Mobile Version

TripIt also has a mobile platform that you can use while on the go. We have used it on the iPhone and iPad.  It gives you almost all the features of the web site.  Any travel alerts you have setup will also appear through the app too. 

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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