The Technonaut

You may not be planning any trips right now, but this is one site you’ll definitely want to bookmark for the future. New web service TripIt makes it incredibly easy to gather all the information about a pending trip in one centralized place. You don’t even have to sign up for an account first. All you do is forward your travel confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com, and they automatically organize your info into a master itinerary, adding Google Maps, weather information, Wikipedia articles, and more along the way. Then, you can easily print the information to take with you, or share your itinerary with friends and family.

This is one of those ideas that are so useful, you wonder why nobody thought of it sooner. I’ve been using this site to help plan my honeymoon, and it has been a real time saver. Last time I took a long trip, I had to manually enter all my destinations, car rental information, and hotel contact info into Outlook, just so I could print it out in a nice calendar format. This time around, all I had to do was forward TripIt a couple emails, make a few corrections, and I was ready to go.

Lavish praise aside, TripIt is still a work in progress.  They could stand to add a few more viewing options, and they’re continuously tweaking their email scraping for accuracy.  But overall, it is shaping up to be an incredibly useful site.

[TripIt]