Want To Keep All Of Your Travel Plans Organized? Use TripIt

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Keeping track of travel reservations can be quite a chore. When planning a trip, I get emails from airlines, hotels, car rentals, trains, meetings, appointments, tickets and whatever else we’re doing. Way back when I kept a folder with printouts of all this information and brought it with me wherever we went. I also needed a backpack full of maps and travel books. Now I’ve traded that folder for a website and phone app that keeps this information organized

Travel back in the day included carrying and reading endless guidebooks. It was especially fun in the rain.Since 2009, I’ve used TripIt to organize my travel plans. The site and subsequent smartphone apps have grown into a robust way to store travel plans and share them with others.

Here’s how the website works. You register your email addresses with TripIt. When you receive a confirmation email, you then forward the email to TripIt and the system processes the info and adds it to your trips. If you want, you can register your email address with the leading providers (Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook), and the website will scrape your email and automatically add any new reservations to your account.

TripIt has become “smarter” over the years. When you get a reservation that doesn’t fit into a trip, it will create a new trip. The way TripIt orders your reservations has also improved. TripIt now puts them into a logical sequence (i.e., you arrive on a plane first, rent a car and finally check in to your hotel).

You can link your TripIt calendar to other calendar programs, such as Outlook, Google Calendar or Apple iCal, so the information is easily accessible. If you’re traveling with others or have people you want to share your trip plans with, it’s easy to give them access to your trip plans.

All these functions are available with the free version of TripIt. I upgraded to TripIt Pro, which costs an additional $49 a year (but you can get a 30-day free trial).

TripIt Pro has everything the free version does but also gives real-time flight alerts for changes, helps find alternate flights and better seats, and tells you if you can get a fare refund due to a price drop.

There are alternatives to TripIt. If you have an Apple device, Siri will scan your mail and suggest adding events to your Apple calendar. The same is true for Google and Gmail. AwardWallet also keeps track of your reservations, but only if they’re linked to your loyalty account, so there’s more chance for one to slip by unnoticed.

I’m staying with TripIt. It’s one of the travel apps I use during every trip. I feel safe in saying that the TripIt website and smartphone app have been game-changers in the way we travel.

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