July 30, 2008

Trip It Real Good

Organized Travel with TripIt

You edited your stuff until your bag fits overhead (if it requires more than a bikini and cover-up, you’re not doing it). But that avalanche of travel info printouts could fill a steamer trunk.

Next time, get help from online travel tool TripIt. Its patent-pending technology, the Itinerator, gobbles info from all your sources and spits it back out as a single plan.

Lost you with “patent-pending”? Yeah, it’s dorky. (We’d never actually say the word “Itinerator” out loud.) But it’s easy and damn useful. You e-mail everything — flights from ba.com, hotels from Orbitz, car rental confirmation — to one address and it’s all (miraculously, mysteriously) condensed into one itin.

TripIt gets bonus points for all the, uh, bonuses: weather forecasts, city guides, maps, and directions. Traveling with a gang? E-mail everyone the Itinerator-generated play-by-play and never again suffer the dreaded “what time is our flight again?” call when you’re already at the airport.

Ah, technology. We just love this interweb thing.

Available online at tripit.com.