Travel can be stressful even in the best of circumstances and technology has made traveling easier and also more chaotic.
Sure, we've gone from having fold-out paper maps, to Map Quest, to Google Maps, but we've also gone from having all our travel documents on hard copy to scattered across all our different digital accounts. Our boarding pass is in our email, our friends address was sent via text, and if your battery dies or you don't have internet access you may not be able to get to the information you need.
So, any product or service that comes along and helps make traveling both easier and less stressful is worth a look in my books and lately TripIt has been doing just that for me.
TripIt is an app which coalesces all your travel information into one central location, and it does so intuitively and automatically!
Let's take a look at an example to help explain!
TripIt on Your Browser
Here you can see a few of my travel plans for a recent trip to San Diego for Social Media Marketing World. The amazing thing about TripIt is that I did not enter any of this information manually.
The speaking engagement at the bottom was imported automatically from Event Brite, the hotel details were imported from Gmail, and the whole trip entry on TripIt was created automatically when I booked my flight with Air Canada.
Clicking on any part of your trip plan will bring up more options for information and notations. If you need to add contact information for travel agents or write down names of restaurants you wanted to eat at, you can do so within each travel item. For example, there was a discount code for Uber offered to speakers at Social Media Marketing World and I entered that code into my itinerary for reference while at the conference.
TripIt on Your Phone
Where the rubber will really hit the road for TripIt is when you're traveling. Fortunately, I think this is where TripIt excels.
Open the app on your phone and you'll be presented an itinerary which clearly and cleanly displays only the most essential information you need at a glance; booking numbers, flight times, hotel addresses.
Clicking each entry will bring up more detailed information and more importantly, some added functionality. Click your flight booking and not only can you check-in through the app, you'll be presented with additional information about the airport you're flying out of. Perhaps you need a bite to eat before a cross-country flight, click your flight, click the airport maps at the bottom and see what restaurants are closest to your gate!
It's streamlined functionality like this that I love about TripIt, it doesn't revolutionize the way we travel but it reduces the stress of our travels by aggregating all the important information we need, and providing us with some additional functionality that we want.
Until next time,
Have fun storming the castle!
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