So as I was planning to fill up my TripIt itinerary for an upcoming trip, I realized that I'm doing the same research that I did years ago when I visited many of the same places.

I've been using TripIt for a couple of years, not so much for flight tracking but for building up an itinerary that I can access before, during and after the trip. Though I wonder how far back they will archive previous trips. It may be worth archiving them yourself, since you can't depend on a free service which also happens to be a startup.


The other thing I realized is that I just do all this homework before trips but don't document the trip itself. I haven't been particularly interested in writing up TripAdvisor reviews or writing a blog.

But there's really no judgement or appraisals of the places I've visited, other than in my mind and memories. So is there a quick and easy way to do some of these things?

Like rate hotels and restaurants, even enter a brief summary, attach pictures. I've been using Evernote Food for awhile and that does let you do log your meals pretty easily. I've mostly been taking pictures though. It would be useful if they had a means to upload this info. to TripAdvisor or some other travel site, if you wanted to. Or maybe export to a format that a blogging site like blogspot.com could automatically format and publish.

TripIt could be a good starting point but obviously their business model is to upsell the paid version of their service, not to enable journaling.

I don't know if they provide APIs to outsiders to import/export the data from the itineraries its users build up. Nor whether most TripIt users are building up detailed itineraries (beyond having the flight and hotel info auto-populated) or whether TripIt is the most popular service for this kind of activity.

Or whether popular travel sites like TripAdvisor would work with a different service like TripIt to allow customers to send data back and forth between the services.

Maybe it wouldn't be that popular an activity. TripIt and most other travel services have hooks to Facebook and other social networks and sharing plans may be the extent of what most travelers should communicate about their travels.

Or has anyone been using software which lets you collect this kind of data -- ratings or notes, judgements of places you've visited?