Consolidating Travel Details with TripIt

Posted on Monday, January 26th, 2009, at 8:04 pm, and filed under Meta Category. Note: Hypertext links in the printed form of this document are marked with a superscript "L" plus a number. The number corresponds to the list of web addresses at the bottom of the document.

I’m sitting in the Denver airport (and quite pleased to have remembered my note to myself about tunneling through ad-laden interception proxy) with lots to think and blog about after this year’s Midwinter meeting. It was a very productive meeting, but I am still in “travel mode” so I thought I’d mention a new service called TripIt that has made this travel notably easier.

TripIt is “a personal travel assistant that automatically organizes all your travel plans.” Getting started is easy: one just forwards confirmation e-mails from flights, lodging, airport shuttles, rental cars and the like to “plans@tripit.com” and the software starts adding all of this information into a consolidated itinerary. The software offers destination information such as maps and directions. The itinerary includes links to online check-in services and flight information. And you can do all of this without creating an account. If you do create an account, you can build a network of fellow travelers to see when you might be in the same location at the same time. (If I were to travel much, I can see where this would be a very handy “social networking” feature.)

For instance, you can see a public view of my recent itinerary for the OLE Project and ALA Midwinter trip. (TripIt didn’t understand the ALA travel service confirmation e-mails for the lodging arrangements, so I had to enter that by hand.) This view is missing my confirmation numbers and other private details, but it is a useful view to share with spouses and office managers. If you join TripIt and want to connect networks, let me know.