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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For those who love Farecast, a website that is supposed to help you predict whether the fare you’re paying is the lowest or not, but hate Microsoft, life just got a bit more difficult. Microsoft snapped up the small company earlier this month in an apparent effort to get expand their penetration into the travel business. This should either ensure that Farecast sticks around for a while since it now has a big company behind it, or the technology will end up integrated into some Microsoft proprietary solution meaning you can only use it if you buy from them. I hope it is the former.
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01 Apr
Posted by scottc as Mobile applications, Web Sites
If you find yourself stuck at the airport with only a (web enabled) mobile phone, then the new mobile site from Flightstats could come in quite handy. You’ll find everything from flight status to airport security wait times.
Just type mobile.flightstats.com into your (mobile) browser.
Another easy way to find the status of your flight is to enter the flight number in Google (I have noticed that this doesn’t work well with the mobile version of Google).
You’ll notice that they also use Flightstats for their data.
Via: PocketPC thoughts.
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19 Feb
Posted by JeffK as Being productive, TravelTechTalk, Web Sites
The only thing worse than ‘contracting’ a spyware infection is getting rid of it. Some of the more insidious ‘packages’ claw their way into the deepest bowels of your system and can take hours for even an expert to remove.
A ’secret weapon’ does exist. The spyware and virii can’t actively fight if they aren’t running. How do you keep them from running when they load as the system starts?
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25 Jan
Posted by scottc as Being productive, Getting there, Web Sites
I’m sure it’s fairly safe to assume that everyone with Internet access has heard of Google. Virtually everyone has, at some point in time turned to them with a search request.
Today I’m going to show how Google can help you as a traveler.
Last week I showed you Google Transit, and then realized I use Google a lot more than I thought. People saying how Google is taking over our lives are not joking…
First of all we’ll look at some of the “hidden” features the normal search screen has to offer that can benefit travelers.
Flight status, schedules and airport lookup
In the normal Google search, enter your departure city and destination. Google understands city names and airport codes. Clicking on “Flights from” will take you to Expedia and instantly shows all the available flights for the dates entered. Of course, you can also pick one of several other travel sites.
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Yesterday I wrote about a quick way to get RSS feeds delivered to your inbox, mainly for those that don’t want to deal with a "real" RSS reader.
For those that do want to learn more about RSS and are looking for a great way to stay up to date with their favorite site I suggest checking out NewsGator.
The NewsGator feed readers used to be commercial (read: paid programs). As of last week, their entire suite of readers are free. This includes their desktop reader and mobile readers for Windows Mobile, Blackberry and Java enabled phones.
The best part about the different NewsGator programs is that you only have to configure them once; your favorite feeds are saved on their servers and can be accessed through any of their applications.
Let me clarify; you can subscribe to an RSS feed on your desktop, and that feed will automatically be subscribed to on your phone. Or you can read an article on your online NewsGator page, and that article will show as "read" on your desktop.
It really is a great application, and has saved me from death by boredom many times when I’ve been stuck on the tarmac.
So much information is available through RSS nowadays that you need to be careful you don’t get a bad case of information overload!
Thankfully NewsGator makes it very simple to find RSS feeds, and even offer a "panic button" when you are drowning in unread items (like I am most of the time).
The following versions of NewsGator are now available for free:
Head on over to NewsGator and signup. Don’t forget to add this site to your list of RSS feeds!
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