TripIt.com
This week, I discovered TripIt. TripIt is a dead simple travel itinerary web service. In a nutshell-- you forward email confirmations from a variety of rail, airline, hotel, and car rental sites to plans@tripit.com and a travel itinerary will be created automatically.
But it is more than that -- you can invite friends or coworkers to view and collaborate on the itinerary. You can also publish an ical calendar (think Google calendar) feed so friends, family, and coworkers know where you are.
I tried it with an upcoming trip and the service worked flawlessly, merging an airline confirmation with a rental car confirmation, to produce a unified itinerary.
I have decided that I will be using it for all of my business related travel in the near future.
A few random thoughts:
- For business travelers, I can see the value of this. I can hand an employee their marching orders and tell them to add me to their business trip. With no effort from me, I know have their flight number, schedule, and rental car reservation information. Likewise, they can have access to mine.
- When my wife and I visit family, I always forward the flight information to my father who meets us at the airport. Now I can just add him as a collaborator and he gets the details and changes automatically.
- Although I haven't tried it yet, it crossed my mind that a TripIt generated itinerary would be perfect to submit with a foreign business visa application -- just forward the emails to TripIt and print.
The site is as simplistic as the idea.
The site's investors hope to make money on advertising and data mining, so someday there will be cluttered ads all over your itinerary, and they will probably mercilessly sell your private information. However, for now, it is free and it does exactly what it promises to do.
Labels: business travel
