Organize Your Travels with TripIt

I really don’t travel that much but I have an obsession with being as organized as possible.  TripIt allows you to easily manage all of your travels from their website, their mobile website or their newly released iPhone application.  Another cool feature of TripIt is way that the service lets you share your travels with other people and it will even let you know when you and your friends will have overlapping schedules

TripIt just released their iPhone application that lets you view your schedule on the go (even in airplane mode).   It allows iPhone users to keep track on all of their flights and hotel information.  You can also add activities that you might do while on your trip.

TripIt couldn’t be any easier to use.  All you have to do is forward any confirmation emails you may get to plans@tripit.com.  Their service works with hundreds of travel websites and will decipher the emails and create an itinerary for you. 

You can even take this organization a step further if you use a calendar program that supports iCal feeds.  TripIt publishes an iCal feed of your itinerary that you can then subscribe to in your calendar program.  I use Google Calendar for my “calendaring” needs and subscribing to the iCal feed is very easy.  You first copy the iCal feed from TripIt then go to your Google Calendar settings and subscribe to it.  All of your trip then show up in your Google Calendar in a different color.  It also includes the flight information in that feed so you can see what time your flight is, what airline you’re flying and the flight number.

If you fly a lot for your company and you don’t personally book your flights or hotels, I’m not sure if the site will pick up your confirmation emails.  If anybody has experience with this please let us know in the comments.