For the past couple of months I’ve been using a travel management service that has some nice features to make life easier for the frequent traveler. It’s called TripIt, and if you travel a lot, I recommend you give it a look.
TripIt aggregates all information about your travel in a single place and allows you to share itineraries with anyone you choose. It uses that most prosaic form of communication – e-mail – to update information. When you make a flight, hotel or car rental reservation, you forward the confirmation e-mail to TripIt, which automatically adds the information to your itinerary. The service is very good at parsing e-mail confirmations from most major airlines and hotel chains.
It doesn’t get everything right – it couldn’t figure out a message from JetBlue in my case – but the service is new and developers are constantly updating it. In nearly every case I encountered, TripIt was able to seamlessly integrate messages from a variety of travel providers into a single itinerary. It’s then easy to share that information with anyone via e-mail. You can also integrate your itinerary into popular calendar programs and have updates sent to you via SMS.
TripIt adds information you don’t request but which is nevertheless useful. For example, if you’re flying into SFO and staying at the Hotel Palomar, it will include Google Maps directions to your destination. It also has nice touches like weather forecasts that are built right into the itinerary.
TripIt is trying to build social networking features into the service, though I’m not sure that’s a winning strategy. I don’t see much value in sharing my travel plans with people who don’t care about them, but if the service can figure out how to integrate recommendations via third-party services like Yelp, it could have a winner. In short, there are a lot of promising directions the company could follow if it builds a critical mass of users. I, for one, am sold. I expect I’ll be using TripIt for a long time to come. The service adds real value and efficiency to my busy schedule.