Perhaps the most stressful part of the day before departure for me is making sure that I have a coherent itinerary email to send out. Sure, packing is also a pain in the ass, but that can be overcome pretty quickly with a glass of vodka and a lot of not caring if you happen to show up without any underwear. But the itinerary email seems to actually be a bigger issue. I like to have a single itinerary detailing all the flights, hotels, rental cars, trains and any other reservations that we might have scheduled. But since I do not book all those things through a single party, getting a consolidated view can be pretty annoying. Thankfully, the Internet heard my pain and responded in the form of TripIt, a new service that handles all those confirmation emails for me, processing them and making something pretty and useful out of the mess.
Our upcoming trip to Turkey and the UK has five flights on four different airlines, stops in at least three cities and several hotel and car reservations, most of which I haven’t actually made yet. Using the TripIt service I forwarded the confirmation emails that I’ve received so far and it put together a well formatted and easy to use list of day-by-day details, including historical weather information (it is predicting sunny days in London, which I find hard to believe), Google Maps for all the destinations, links for online check-in for the flights and other useful stuff. And the best part is that they made up a word to name the engine that they use to make it all happen: The Itinerator!
This is easily the best new tool I’ve seen in a long time for travel planning and management. Check it out. And thanks to Matt E. for sharing!
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