Originally Posted by
bdesmond
Personally I've found the alternate flight data to be incredibly useful as someone who primarily flies UA. UA's website and rebooking processes are archaic and manual, and when it's Friday afternoon, your flight has gone MX, all the directs are way overbooked, and you want to get home, being able to have TripIt tell you that there are three seats SFO-ORD via MCI or something and feed that info to a CSR to be rebooked quickly makes a huge difference (to me). Using that function even once in a calendar year is worth 50 bucks to me.
I also am a fan of the network feature - I have my colleagues and friends in there and when we're going to intersect someplace it makes it easy to plan dinner or drinks or something together.
As I mentioned above, this is less of an attractive benefit flying AS, but I can see how it might be useful for me if I need to get somewhere and AS is willing to endorse the ticket over to another airline.
As for the network feature, I think the little bit that alerts you when you are near someone in your network happens even in the free version.