Travel Tools - TripIT itinerary organizer-what do you think?

Found this today on one of my favorite sites.
http://lifehacker.com/software/launch/tripit-organizes-your-travel-itinerary-automatically-via-email-300833.php
So do you think this is a tool you would use to organize your trips?

Didn't recognise my Novotel booking, and didn't recognise my Lufthansa booking for this weekend for the Yodeldee-Do... Not a good start!

SmilingBoy.

I found that it only recognised US-centric hotels / bookings, etc.

I saw this company's TechCrunch 40 presentation and I have to say, it's very cool. Their CEO says their goal is to eliminate the manila folder full of printouts of flights, hotels, rental cars and miscellaneous notes. After watching the demo and playing with the site, I can say that it works.

You just forward your confirmation emails from whatever site to plans@tripit.com and they automatically create a dossier for you. The parse all the data in the mail, and group all of your flights/hotels/cars into a single trip dossier.

You can print it, view it all online in a single page, and view it on a mobile phone. They add Google maps, weather info, pertinent news items, and driving/taxi information from airports to hotels, etc.

They let you do online checkin, seat selection, etc. right from your dossier.

Here's the best part: you can share the itin with other people. You can add others as viewers so they can see your plans, and you can add other travelers as well so a group traveling together has access to the same information, and can add notes and comments for the others in the group. Look at http://www.tripit.com and watch the demo to see how it works.

It's free, and dead easy. I really, really like this!

Beat you to it alanw :D
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=737222

Beat him to it TWICE:
http://flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=737221



What's their privacy policy? I'd be hesitant to foward all this info to them.

That is my concern.They have to get something out of this and I am guessing it is your personal info and info on your travel habits.

I saw this company's TechCrunch 40 presentation and I have to say, it's very cool. Their CEO says their goal is to eliminate the manila folder full of printouts of flights, hotels, rental cars and miscellaneous notes. After watching the demo and playing with the site, I can say that it works. I would be really impressed if they would try to parse anything thrown at them. Currently, it seems they only have a few templates, and if you don't use one of those providers, your out of luck. They even claim to support Lufthansa, but they don't, I tried with two confirmations.

SmilingBoy.

I'd love to see the automatic map feature turned off as an option. (takes time to load)
and it had problems with my hertz rental car... but I like it :)

Looks pretty cool! I tried it with one of our upcoming itineraries and it worked very well. The Hotel info is booked in bzbdavid's name but I just forwarded it on after changing his name to mine on the fwd email and it picked it up and plugged it in to my itinerary just fine. I think this could be a nice tool to have but I am a little concerned by what other posters have asked... whats in it for them? :)

TripIt works with bookings from the following booking sites:
Agent

* AAA
* Amadeus checkmytrip.com
* American Express Travel
* American Express Centurion Travel
* CheapTickets
* Expedia
* GetThere
* Hotwire
* Hotels.com
* Hotelsdiscounts.com
* makemytrip.com
* Orbitz
* Priceline.com
* Travelocity
* Trondent American Express


Airline

* Air France
* American Airlines
* Alaska Airlines
* Aloha Airlines
* Air Canada
* airTran
* British Airways
* Cape Air
* Cathay Pacific Airways
* Continental
* Delta
* easyJet
* Hawaiian Airlines
* JetBlue
* Lufthansa
* Northwest
* Midwest Airlines
* Ryanair
* Southwest
* Swiss International Airlines
* United Airlines
* US Airways
* Virgin America
* Virgin Atlantic


Hotel

* Best Western
* Cambria Suites
* Choice Hotels
* Clarion
* Comfort Inn
* Comfort Suites
* Crowne Plaza
* Doubletree
* Four Points by Sheraton
* Four Seasons
* Hampton Inn
* Homewood Suites
* Howard Johnson
* Hilton
* Hyatt
* Holiday Inn
* InterContinental Hotels
* La Quinta
* Luxury Collection
* Marriott
* Quality Inn
* Radisson Hotels & Resorts
* Sheraton
* Sleep Inn
* Super 8 Motel
* Travelodge
* Westin


Rental Car

* Alamo
* Avis
* Avis Europe
* Budget
* Dollar
* Hertz
* Thrifty



I emailed them and got a response right back. They're working on lots more, including being able to read in most PNRs and those Amadeus-style text files that my travel agent always attaches to an email.

I commented on this yesterday on my blog (http://theglobaltraveller.blogspot.com/2007/09/itinerary-organiser.html).

I think it has potential, but for me is still annoying in some aspects.

Hello everyone,
Thanks for the feedback and for giving TripIt (http://www.tripit.com) a try. I’m the president (http://www.tripit.com/press/bios) and co-founder of TripIt and thought it might be helpful to share my thoughts regarding the comments above…

• To start, please remember that TripIt is still in beta and has been open to the world for less than a week, which means we have a lot more fun features in the works. The comments we are getting from actual users are incredibly helpful in determining what we build next, so please keep them coming!

• Regarding the TripIt Itinerator’s ability to parse information, we are not yet 100%, but every email you send us helps the Itinerator improve. We started by focusing on the US market, but are expanding this quickly. At the moment, the Itinerator supports over 70 booking services and we are adding more every day. (This technology is very cool, super flexible and one of the things we are most proud of.) The following may be more info than you want, but one challenge we have is that each booking service has numerous formats and they change. Some changes the system handles automatically and some require us to tweak the Itinerator. A second challenge is that email services often modify outgoing emails in subtle ways that people don’t see, but that drive computers crazy. Bottom line is today we are very good with the big online booking sites and as we see more volume, TripIt will continue to get better with a growing number of suppliers and travel agencies.

• Regarding privacy, I want to emphasize that we take confidentiality extremely seriously. Most of our team has been in the online travel industry for many years (the majority from Hotwire), and we know very well that if we don’t treat confidential user information appropriately, we won’t have users very long. For specifics, please check out our privacy policy and if you have any concerns, let us know. We want to make it as clear as possible that we do not share a customer’s personal travel information with advertisers.

• To my surprise, we get the question “how will TripIt make money” a lot. To be clear, TripIt will not charge travelers for the service. Fortunately, travel is the largest ecommerce category and there are a number of proven ways to make money without being in the booking business. TripIt will be advertiser supported and offer add-on services to users in tasteful and helpful manner. Some examples for a hypothetical trip to Boston include:
o Here are a few offers from merchants in Boston you might find useful.
o You’ve booked a hotel, would you like to book a restaurant or activity in the area?
o We also have a TripSearch (http://www.tripit.com/trip_search) tool that helps travelers save time and search the sites they like best which is a revenue opportunity for us.

In the end, we believe that we will have a successful business as long as we build a service that people genuinely find helpful. Achieving the goal of being useful is where our energy is focused.

Anyway, we’ve had a gratifying initial response from users in the past week with feedback and suggestions. We’re working furiously to incorporate all this into future iterations of the service. If you are interested in keeping tabs on our progress, please sign up for our email at TripIt (http://www.tripit.com) or subscribe to our blog (http://blog.tripit.com).

Finally, if you like what we are doing, the best way you can help us is to tell your friends or better yet invite them to be Friends in TripIt so you can stay in touch on the road. If you have any issues with TripIt at all, please send them to us and we’ll get them in the queue for development. I personally read every email that comes in.

Best regards,
Gregg Brockway
President & co-founder
TripIt

Welcome to FT, Gregg, and thanks for your thoughtful post. I'm sure there are lots of frequent travelers here who will be watching your product with interest. I know I am.

sounds very interesting. I'm going to try it for a trip coming up this weekend.

Welcome to FT, Gregg, and thanks for your thoughtful post. I'm sure there are lots of frequent travelers here who will be watching your product with interest. I know I am.

Thanks and Welcome to Flyertalk, Gregg.

Looks very interesting

I will need to check out the security risk though.... just leaves me with an element of uneasiness.

I am having difficulty e-mailing my confirmations. I received a message that my hotel and airline confirmations are not understood. Otherwise, looks like a good site. I'll keep trying. I would like the site to be more specific as to how to enter our confirmation numbers and/or forwarded e-mails from specific carriers and hotels.

I've been using this for a couple of months now and it's by far the best site of it's kind on the web. I really like the fact that I can share my itinerary with my wife so she now has all of my hotel and flight info. Since I'm traveling so much she tends to forget where I am and when I'm coming home.

The site feeds into iCal, so she is able to see my itinerary on her Mac without me sending a bunch of emails that she has to sort through. It actually integrates better with her calendar than mine since I use outlook 2003.

It also allows or mobile access. This has completly eliminated my manilla folder and printing reservations info to carry with me.

Give it a try.. It's pretty cool

Agree. It's become a standard part of every trip I take now. They have improved the importing of itineraries, though they're still choking on non-English emails sometimes.

The site has a tendency to "marry" some separate bookings -- particularly back-to-back trips -- and display them as one even when it is separate record locators and trips that were sent to them. So while it might look like I am in say the UK for a month -- at least on the calendar -- I might actually be in Argentina.

I like the site otherwise as a place to easily consolidate a great variety of trips.

It is a good idea but I am not impressed. Here is what I got back when I sent them a BA rez:

Unable to understand: 'FW: Your British Airways Travel Reservation: XXXXXX'

I'm very happy with tripit so far - much more so than dopplr, for example. I love that it parses email (and seems quite accurate these days) so I don't have to enter anything online - in fact I rarely go to the web site at all, just interacting with email. It's very handy to be able to email plans@tripit.com with a "get flight today" and have it reply with my details, and it has been super quick with this. I do wish it included gate and delay info though...

I'm also having tripit's ical info appear in my gmail and Outlook calendars. But I wish they would sync to my iPhone or appear in Google's online iPhone calendar...

I imagine tripit would be very useful to FlyerTalkers, especially as a way to see each others' itineraries... Perhaps finer-grained security control would be another nice addition to the site so I could, say, show my flights but not my hotels...