Travel tools: TripIt, an online DIY travel organizer

Is Web 2.0+ making online travel booking easier or more complicated? With all the information, blog posts, RSS feeds and social networking sites that you subscribe to, is Google Reader enough to keep it all organized? If you’re like me — the extent of your trip prep is labeling airline confirmation and hotel reservation emails “important” — then you might enjoy the new DIY travel tool TripIt.com.

TripIt.com is fresh off the heels of their debut at the invite-only TechCrunch40, a conference where the hottest new startups debut their products. Started by Hotwire co-founder Gregg Brockway and Hotwire colleague Scott HintzIt, TripIt is an organizer where you can send all your travel confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com, then they’ll email you a link to your itinerary complete with Wikipedia city information, Seat Guru advice, weather forecasts, driving directions, etc. Check out a sample itinerary.

I’m thankful that you don’t have to have your plane or hotel plans sorted before planning a trip. I’ll be taking my honeymoon in December. We’re still trying to figure out if we’ll cram it between my husbands work obligations in Australia, or if we’ll take a trip sooner and closer to home. So, I’ve signed up with TripIt to start storing ideas. Keep reading if you want to hear how my initial test run went.

What web tools do you use to plan your travels? Does it vary if it’s a short trip vs. a long trip, business or personal?

Testing TripIt.com

I used the travel search function to start looking for hotels for a leg of our honeymoon. When I saw that I had to fill out the city, I was worried it might not take international destinations since there was no option for country. I typed in Byron Bay under hotels and it led me to choose between a variety of big travel providers like Orbitz, Travelocity, Expedia and Marriott.

Again, I was worried they would only have chain hotels. Not so. I selected Orbitz and was led me to a resort lodge that was surprisingly un-chain like. They didn’t have availability for the high season dates I wanted, but at least there was hope I wouldn’t be staying at a Marriott for my honeymoon.

The Orbitz search only returned a handful of options so I tried Travelocity next. I was happy to see that Travelocity returned some different properties including one that absolutely made me want to get it. But as I tried random dates throughout December, nothing came back available.

I wanted to save the property “The Villas of Byron,” so I could call them direct to find out if they had any open dates at all during December, but on TripIt, all I could do was save the search I used. But at least there was a description box where I could write my notes and save it to my Honeymoon file.

Note: TripIt works with a lot more booking sites than just Orbitz and Travelocity. See their full list in the “Cool Web Info” box on the home page.

Fun features: Surfing the site, I liked two things right off the bat. One was that you can monitor your friends trips. I immediately asked my husband to sign up and turn in his upcoming travel bookings so I can keep track of his itinerary without having to dig through emails to find his flights (and when I need to pick him up). This will be very handy for us. The other bit I was eager to use was the calendar. I will be able to merge my TripIt plans with my Google Calendar. And then, once the trip is prepared, we can access it online, print it out or even take it mobile.

Disappointment: I couldn’t really find how to do a mock itinerary. It seemed to only want to do an itinerary once there were booking confirmations. Also, I wondered how it would add the itinerary if you emailed them a booking option that didn’t come from their search tools. I’m wondering if this is a function I just haven’t found yet, or if it isn’t available. You can, however, make a lot of notes with links.

Summary: Over all, I think this is going to be fantastic for business travelers and especially sharing info with colleagues and spouses. It’ll be good for weekenders and short trips, too. But I’ll need to keep testing it to see if it can really replace a manila folder for a dreamer of longer-term travel like me. I want to be able to plan a “what if” itinerary, cost it out and look at it visually before actually booking.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19, 2007 at 9:23 am by Jen Leo and is filed under Business Travel, Global, News, Tips & Advice, Weekend Getaways. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.