How many of you have found yourselves in a situation similar to this?
– You booked flights from Chico to San Diego on United.com
– You booked a car rental at Hertz.com.
– You booked a hotel through Marriott.com
The result is a digital (or printed) sheaf of e-mail confirmations with data about your trip.
Wouldnt it be nice if you could easily consolidate all three separate pieces into one electronic itinerary?
You can.
Take a look at Tripit.
The way it works is very simple. You set up an account and specify the e-mail address from which you will forward the confirming e-mail you get from travel suppliers. Then each time you make reservations for a trip you forward those confirming e-mails to plans@tripit.com.
Then voil! – Tripit captures the data from the e-mail and formulates it all into one nice, clean itinerary which you can then access, modify, print, send to friends, and so on.
Most travel suppliers support Tripit. Heres the complete list. Youll find airlines, car rental companies, hotels, Amtrak, popular all-purpose travel sites (Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, etc.), corporate booking tools (Cliqbook, etc.), other travel agencies via the computerized reservation system they use, and a lot more.
Additionally, Tripit gives you the option of adding maps, directions and notes; obtaining weather, destination information and flight status; and plenty more.
Heres a sample itinerary .
In addition to leisure travelers, Tripit can be an especially worthwhile tool for business travelers and executive assistants who plan travel. I suggest to the clients whom I train that they give it a try.
My experience with Tripit is very, very good. Not perfect, but very good. Sometimes it can misinterpret the data it reads and format a trip incorrectly. But that is the exception, not the rule, and the creators actively seek user input to improve the experience and results. And if you see something in one of your itineraries that is wrong you can edit it to make it right. I had that experience with an incorrectly interpreted confirmation from United. It was simple to fix.
You can also add data manually for anything not supported by Tripit.
For example, you book flights from Sacramento to Albuquerque on Southwest (supported), a car rental with Budget (supported), a Hilton in Albuquerque (supported) and a small B&B in Santa Fe (not supported). After forwarding the confirming e-mails from the first three vendors to Tripit, you then access your Tripit account to review the consolidated itinerary. At that point you add the B&B details to the record and now have everything in one place.
Sound easy? It is.
Give Tripit a try and comment back to the blog to report your experiences.
