My Favorite Tools: TripIt

This is my second of a few posts I’ll be doing that highlights some tools I use for “travel hacking.” The first is here. The third is here.

Ah, TripIt, what can I say, we’ve been together for quite some time and you’re still making me happy.

TripIt is the tool I use to track everywhere I go and everywhere I stay.  Since 2008, I’ve been able to store all my itineraries for flights, hotels, rentals, and more.  It’s so simple and easy to manage.  TripIt is by far my favorite tool for this, as other tools that do the same seem to fall short.

A favorite feature to TripIt is that I can send an itinerary from my email to plans@tripit.com.  Since TripIt knows my email address, it automatically stores my plans either adding to an already created trip or creating a new one with the information.  I can then go into TripIt to make any tweaks to the plans.  So much easier than manually adding the information to planning tool.

One thing that amazed me was the number of itineraries that it was able to handle.  All my flights, hostels, trains, rentals, and more while traveling around SE Asia were almost all stored correctly.  Even the very obscure ones where I booked it using a translator.

I’ve added most all the trips I’ve taken since my first going to El Salvador when I was 16.  As of writing this post, I’ve racked quite the number of travel miles – 172,502 miles!  Along with that, I’ve seen 23 countries and 90 cities.  Thanks to TripIt , it tracks all of those stats:

Six more trips scheduled to finish up the year with the potential for two more.  TripIt is able to track them all.

TripIt also gives you a calendar that is able to be integrated into a calendar like Google Calendar which I use regularly.  Give your calendar a color and it fits it in along with the rest of your daily events so you can avoid making plans while away.

If you are interested, head on over, and sign on up!  It’s free*!

_{*They also have a premium service which will handle point/mile tracking, give you status of your flights, and a few other options that could make the $49 a year price tag worth it for some.}

Perhaps you use a different tool to track your flights.  If so, leave me some info in the comments below!  If you decided to use TripIt, tell me your thoughts of it so far.