Perhaps the most frustrating part of putting together a complex travel itinerary is keeping track of all the pieces.  On an upcoming trip to Turkey and the UK I’ve got one airline reservation with five flights, at least three hotel reservations (not all are booked yet), two different car reservations and probably a few other things, too.  Getting a coherent single itinerary out of that mess has always required an afternoon of cutting and pasting together something in email to try to consolidate all the information.  It was functional but never looked particularly good.

Enter the Itinerator.  The Itinerator is the name that a new website, TripIt.com, has given to their engine behind their service.  The concept is ridiculously simple.  You forward all the confirmation emails that you receive from the various sources to their engine and the Itinerator consolidates them into a single master itinerary for you.  As you add more reservations you simply forward those emails to the generic address that they use and it continues to add the information to the existing itinerary.  I did a quick test with an email from Continental detailing the five flights on four different airlines and a second email from Hilton for one of the hotel reservations on my upcoming trip.  TripIt was able to put together all the details, including maps of the places where I had stopovers (but not connections!), historical weather details for each location each day (it is predicting sunny in London, which I find hard to believe) and check-in and check-out information for the hotel, including the confirmation number, address, phone number and room type.  In short, everything that I would’ve normally spent hours cobbling together on my own comes up with minimal effort and it looks a ton better. The image above is one day from the sample they show on their site.

Should you have reservations from companies it doesn’t support you can manually add the details to the master itinerary.  There are a bunch of other cool options it seems to have, including export to your calendar of choice (Outlook, iCal and Google) and access via a mobile device. I’ve only spent a short amount of time playing with it so far this morning, but I can see a long and mutually beneficial relationship developing very quickly with this one. 

This site definitely wins my cool travel site of the week award.  Thanks to Matt E. for sharing it with me!

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