I have been using Tripit to keep my travel information organized for about 2 years. If you don’t know what Tripit is let me give you a simple description.
It organizes all of your travel plans in one location automatically and allows you to create a travel network with friends. To use Tripityou just email your travel confirmation to Tripit and everything else is magic. Once you start using the social aspect you will always know when a friend it traveling nearby.
When I start talking about travel with friends, somehow Tripit comes up in the conversation. It is designed for the road warriors, however, supports the occasional traveler as well.
A Travel Calendar
1. Sharing Travel Info
When I was first introduced to Tripit it was not the organizational aspect of the application that interested me, but, the ability to share my travel information in a calendar format. Keeping my wife up-to-date of my travel schedule is difficult. With minimal effort on my part, emailing a confirmation, Tripit automatically creates calendar information that my wife can use in Gmail and iCal to see any upcoming trips.
Know Who You Are Near
2. Travel Networks
Tripit lets me know when someone will be in my home town when I am not traveling or in the same city when I go on an upcoming trip. This lets me schedule potential breakfast or dinner arrangements, which beats eating alone at the bar. For me Tripit addresses the who I am near question of travel. You can really see the value in Tripit when your friends and colleagues start to use it.
Keep it Simple Stupid (KISS)
3. Simple to use
In the past I would manually add my flight(s), rental car(s), and hotel(s) to my outlook calendar to keep me on track. With TripitTripit I just email my travel confirmation to plans to Tripit.com and it is automatically added to my travel calendar.
Multiple Mobile Platforms
4. It’s Mobile
I change mobile phones like most people change…Forget it, I cannot think of a good analogy. I switch phone and platforms constantly. I have no allegiance to any vendor I buy what is new and cool and keep moving forward. That being said, TripitTripit runs on Blackberry, iPhone, Android, and provides a mobile website for other platforms. The most important for a travel program like this is to be with me constantly and a mobile app is a great solution.
Travel Statistics
5. Travel Status
Tripit shows some rather cool stats about your travel as compared to others in your network. This makes it easy to understand who the true road warriors are. This status has a double edge because my wife can say you have been away from home x days this year.
I should say Tripit has a great eco-system of products around it. In an earlier article, How to travel Stress Free, Brent talked about how he uses FlightCast on the BlackBerry and FlightTracker Pro on Android to send him flight status updates and reminders based on his TripitTripit calendar.
I personally have not upgraded to Tripit Pro, but I will be doing their 30 trial really soon. Enough about talking about what I like about Tripit, I need to book another business trip. What do you like about Tripit?