TripIt Is My New Best Friend!
If you travel and haven’t yet heard of TripIt, you’re going to be sooo excited! TripIt is a site that keeps track of your travel. But unlike many other sites that promise to help you with your travel, this one is so easy and useful, you’ll actually use it.
Here’s what you do: when you get an itinerary from the airline or a hotel, just email it to [email protected]. You’re done.
I found this really intriguing — this sounds like something that could actually be really useful. Sadly, it couldn’t handle any of the five test flight bookings I sent to it, somewhat unsurprising as they were coming from European airlines. But there are probably many more cool ideas one could build using an email interface.
Email interfaces are excellent, particularly because they function well on your PDA, etc. My expense tracking project (http://xpenser.com) takes it a couple of steps further, letting you interact with it with email, SMS, Twitter, IM, voice, and Web. I’m a huge believer in multi-modal interfaces.
Don’t despair — when I first started using TripIt, I sent them an itinerary for a WestJet flight (WestJet is a discount Canadian airline), and it wasn’t recognized. I went back in a couple of days later and it had reprocessed the itinerary and recognized it that time. In some cases, they just haven’t seen an example of the airline itinerary form, and you might be pleasantly surprised at how quickly they can add them. It also helps to send them a suggestion to add the airline, that can bring their attention to what’s missing.
TripIt is absolutely the best piece of web software that I’ve started using in the past year.