Filed under: Software, iPhone, App Store, iPod touch, First Look, App Review
First Look: Travel organizer Tripit.com offers iPhone app
Do you travel a lot for business or pleasure? If you do, then you'll find the new free iPhone app (click opens iTunes) from Tripit.com to be a great way to organize your trip plans.Tripit.com imports and interprets your itineraries from airlines, hotel chains, ticket outlets, and other travel companies. When you receive an itinerary from one of these providers, you forward it to a special Tripit email address to have it translated into a trip plan automatically (the site supports hundreds of travel providers, and the translation from email into structured itinerary is really quite amazing). You can share your travel plans with friends or colleagues via LinkedIn, and see when your fellow travelers are heading to a city near you or when their plans align with yours.
That collection of trip plans is what you view with the Tripit.com app. The app is linked to your Tripit.com account, and displays a day by day list of flights, car rentals, and other events that make up your trips. Each event can be opened in further detail to show information such as arrival and departure times, confirmation numbers, and more. Links for airport codes bring up Google Maps of the airport vicinity, and other links can check your flight status with a touch.
Since you can always access the mobile version of the Tripit site from a connected iPhone or iPod touch, the big advantage of the native application is that the travel data is cached locally on the phone for offline review (mid-flight, for example). More full-featured apps like the $9.99US TravelTracker or FlightTrack Pro can also store and display your Tripit itineraries via the service's API, and Tripit's developers tell us that they intend to continue supporting third-party application access.
To use the app on your iPhone or iPod touch, all you need to do is sign up for a free Tripit.com account or forward your first itinerary to plans@tripit.com. Take a look at the gallery below for details of the Tripit app at work.
Gallery: Tripit.com iPhone App
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
KarlW said 6:53AM on 4-12-2009
The name tripit just sends me in the wrong direction :S
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alanwestenbroek said 7:44AM on 4-12-2009
Tripit may be the most useful web app I've seen in quite some time. I travel a lot and it is a lifesaver. The iPhone web app is OK, but the offline feature of this app is brilliant.
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Tony said 1:36PM on 4-12-2009
I agree. Tripit is great. Saves a TON of typing, as I can add everything to my calendar in one click.
sai said 2:57PM on 4-12-2009
find out more related apps, articles, reviews in http://www.appsd.com
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MIchael Carnell said 5:00PM on 4-12-2009
Gotta agree with Tony and Alan. Amazingly useful. To have all that info, with maps etc..., all in one place almost justifies the entire iPhone.
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Mike said 7:22PM on 4-12-2009
Agree with the positive comments above. I use Tripit for all of my business travel, and have been wishing they would make a native iPhone app. I'll be downloading it ASAP.
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Quinn Genzel said 7:49PM on 4-12-2009
For a dedicated travel packing app, check out "Packing" here:
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=294710480&mt=8
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exNewt said 9:31PM on 4-12-2009
Very amazing and this is the way thins should work - I just got an AMEX travel schedule for a trip to the UK formatted perfectly...
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Aaron Booker said 11:30PM on 4-12-2009
I LOVE Tripit.com. I do a lot of business travel and it get's quite complex keeping track of all my details for flights, hotels, and car rentals. I just forward all my confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com and Tripit does the rest. Also - from tripit I can add the entire trip to iCal/Entourage in one click. Sweet! Not currently an iPhone user - waiting to see what the new iPhone looks like (versus the Pre) before I pull the trigger. I have vastly better CDMA coverage than GSM, and I'd pay $150 a month more for the iPhone for my 4 user company, so I'm waiting another couple months... :-)
This is a great looking App though. Are iApps and the iPhone worth almost $2K a year?
Aaron
AirGorilla Dave said 1:59AM on 4-13-2009
Dude! This is a cool application. Shared this on our blog at theairgorillablog.com . Wall Street Journal calls it, "Addictive".Really its a travel application. How much do you have to look up your travel info to be defined as addictive.
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DAD said 1:14PM on 4-13-2009
Klezmer Music!
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DAD said 1:24PM on 4-13-2009
Sorry for the Klezmer Music comment, I am using 1Password and it autofilled it from a previous comment. I will have to figure out how to fix it.
Now, I love Tripit.com. I purchased FlightTrackPro so that I could easily integrate it with Tripit.com. In your review you mentioned that FlightTrackPro is more full featured, but the truth is it really doesn't do much more than Tripit.com web app did and I am very disappointed about the $10 that I spent for it. So I am looking forward to trying out the Tripit.com app.
Finally out of 10 comments, 3 of them have been promoting their own sites or apps. That is TACKY.
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drkirkbond said 11:26AM on 4-17-2009
I think that FlightTrackPro and TripIt are an amazing combination. The overall trip info in TripIt is just great and the FlightTrackPro is amazingly helpful for the airline part of the trip. I see them as complementary...personally I feel it was the best 9.99 I had spent in a long time.
TimB said 6:12PM on 4-14-2009
I've tried this app out for my upcoming trip to the U.S. (I'm from Australia), and I've encountered one major problem: it doesn't deal with the international date line correctly. The result is that all the dates after I cross the date line are one day off, specifically one day late. This doesn't happen on the Tripit website, so it's just a problem with the iPhone app.
I've reported the problem to the Tripit folks, so I hope they can fix it soon. Apart from this one problem, this is a great app, particularly if you don't have data access on your iPhone when travelling.
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Jim McMillan said 4:56PM on 5-16-2009
I have found a serious flaw with your iTunes application.
I accessed my account via my iPhone before leaving on a trip to Japan. I reviewed my trip details, all was fine.
When I arrived in Japan (where of course I have no telephone account), I accessed my Tripit application to locate some hotel details. MY TRIPS WERE GONE, and the application of course could not update because I had no data connection!
So when traveling to a location where one cannot access the internet, your app has "forgotten" all the details I was counting on for it to remember!
Making the app useless.
Thanks for nothing.
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Georgia Popplewell said 10:52AM on 5-17-2009
The problem is that once the app is opened, it will check for updates according to a schedule set by the user (anything from every 5 minutes to once a day). If a data connection isn't available, it will erase the existing data and come up blank. For flights that take longer than a day it means that you arrive at your destination to find your info gone, as Jim McMillan did.
What's needed here is a setting that will allow the user to turn off the app's "Check for updates" feature and update manually when necessary.