Pick of the week: tripit.com

So let’s say your planning a family vacation. You’ve booked your rental car, your flights, your hotel and a bunch of activities. If you’re like me you probably haven’t had much fun keeping track of all this stuff. Once you get more than a few seperate confirmation emails for your bookings it becomes a bit annoying to manage. That’s where tripit.com comes in. I read about tripit last week on Techcrunch, and thought it sounded interesting enough that i should give it a try using my upcoming honeymoon to Hawaii.

Start by booking your travel online as you already do today, and all you need to do then is forward your confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com. It matches the email address with the one you used to register and basically takes all your confirmation emails, and automatically extracts the important information and presents it in a attractive,easy to use interface. As i’m writing this, tripit already has a pretty extensive list of travel sites that they support to which they are adding & improving constantly. A minute or so later, you’ll receive an email from tripit letting you know they have received your confirmation email and it is ready for you to view on the site.

It’s all in the details
As they say, it’s all in the details and this is where tripit clinched it for me. Tripit automatically provides directions between multiple destinations using Google Maps, local weather & travel guides for the area(s) you are visiting. The travel guides are pretty weak right now as that feature is still under construction but i think it should be more useful 6-12 months from now.

The other thing i love is the iphone / ipod touch interface they developed at http://m.tripit.com. I definitely will be bringing my ipod touch along for the trip so knowing that i can jump on wifi and have up to date access to my itinerary if needed is great piece of mind. You can also subscribe to your itinerary in Google Calendar or iCal on your mac.

Share your itinerary with family & friends
If you have family or friends that you want to make sure can reach you while you are travelling, you can share your itinerary with them and they can goto your tripit page and see where you are, or find the phone number of the hotel if they need to reach you. The only drawback i can mention right now is that we booked a couple of bed & breakfasts not using major travel portals, and tripit was unable to import those confirmation emails. Not really the end of the world anyways, because you can manually add those parts of your trip.

All in all, a great useful web app. I highly recommend you check out tripit for your next vacation or business trip!