Travel app review no.1: TripIt
This is the first of an occasional series in which I review handy apps for the smartphone wielding traveller.
Oh my goodness, I love TripIt. I have the free app on my phone and iPad, and I access it via the desktop computer. (There’s also a $1.29 app version which has no ads). TripIt has revolutionised how I put together itineraries. All you have to do is sign up, and then simply forward confirmation emails you receive from anywhere you book to plans@tripit.com and TripIt drops it all into a itinerary which you can access on a smartphone, calendar, or anywhere online. It’s like magic. Plus you can share the itinerary with other travellers, so The Poolboy and I can both access the same itinerary straight from our phones.
TripIt instantly recognizes reservations from 3,000+ booking sites including airline, hotels, restaurants, concerts etc. Any bookings that it doesn’t recognise, it saves as an unfiled note and alerts you, so that you can manually add it to an existing trip. If you are booking multiple trips at the one time – say, one in October and one in December, TripIt is smart enough to recognise the dates and drop the relevant bookings into the right trip.
In addition, TripIt adds directions to hotels, maps and weather details to your itinerary AND its all accessible off-line as well as on-line. Perfect for those times you don’t have any wi-fi or data plan.
Once each trip is all booked, I use TripIt to create a PDF version of a shortform itinerary to give to housesitters, family or colleagues that may need to know where we are and how to contact us.
There is also a TripIt Pro version of the app, which currently costs $61.99/year. This version does lots of extra bits like tracking reward points, flight status alerts, seat tracking, fare refund monitoring etc. This could be useful for frequent business travellers, but I haven’t really felt the need to upgrade from free version.
What are your favourite travel apps?
I know this sounds like a sponsored post…but it’s not. I just freakin’ love TripIt and want to tell you all about it!
