Voyagner

TripIt has become my most essential travel app on my iPhone. It is freaking awesome.

Many of you will be familiar with it but I want to share why I think it is so good.

TripIt basically organizes and creates an itinerary based on your bookings for flights and accommodation, etc. It does this automatically when you forward your booking emails to plans@tripit.com and so far it has done this flawlessly with my bookings. Out of interest I did the same with Dopplr and it couldn’t do it, so it looks like TripIt has the edge there. It’s something where I don’t want to stuff about, whatever works is the one I’m going to use and TripIt has always worked.

On past trips I’ve come very close to missing flights or check-in closing times, it’s no fun hearing your name come over the airport PA. TripIt saves me from myself, I don’t end up confusing check-in and boarding times anymore plus it provides some other information about the places I’m traveling to like the weather, maps airport information and details of flight delays, I can also add tidbits for things I might be interested in seeing or doing with their addtotripit FireFox add-on.

My favorite travel tip is also made much easier with the help of TripIt. @EverywhereTrip pointed out that you can use the manual itinerary feature to fudge onward travel bookings in countries like Thailand and Indonesia where it is required. The people who check for onward travel can only ask to see evidence that you have a onward flight they can’t punch the info into a computer and check if it is actually genuine. This can save you some money or keep your options open if booking onward travel is an inconvenience for you, I guess it would also help you if you plan on overstaying your visa as well.

If you haven’t already checked it out I recommend it. It’s really cool technology tripit.com