Initial Thoughts of TripIt

I've been playing with TripIt a bit recently and thought I'd share my thoughts so far.

The idea behind the program is that you forward your confirmation emails to them, and it automatically generates an itinerary for you, which you can access via mobile apps or export to Outlook or Google Calendar. They have a free mode and a premium. Premium adds more features like flight tracking and frequent flier management. But as I'm not flying (instead taking Eurostar) and don't fly enough for frequent flier programmes, I'm just using the free features.

So the much vaunted importation feature. I tried sending it Booking.com, Eurostar and First Great Western confirmations to the designated address and it did a reasonable job of parsing the hotel, but struggled with the trains. My Eurostar trip is in two parts - Exeter to London and London to Lille, it recognised there was a change of train in London, but couldn't parse it very well. I had to manually enter the departure time of the second train from London in both directions and correct the seat reservation details, which were listed under the wrong train. From the Great Western confirmation, it managed to work out the train times OK, but the trains were all duplicated. TripIt does provide a link to provide feedback about the accuracy of the imports.

The next problem I noticed was just after I imported to the calendar, it had got the time zones confused and assumed the whole journey was under Central European Time (CET) rather then GMT (Greenwich Mean Time). An annoyance as you have an enormous list of cities to scroll through when manually setting the time zone. It is more of a problem with the calendar exports, as they allow for the zone and therefore show all the wrong times.

I do like the way that it automatically adds a map showing your hotel, and shows the average weather for the duration of your trip. Hopefully this will update to actual weather as it gets closer to departure.It also stores all your booking references and allows space for other relevant info to be manually added.

The Android application is basic, providing access to the itinerary but has already proved itself useful when I forgot my confirmation codes when collecting my tickets from the machine at the station. Quick referral to the app, and I was good to go.

So my thoughts so far are generally good, but they do need to work more on the import of data. All the sites I used are listed as being fully supported, but I am thinking that it will work better on point to point flights then on a rail journey with multiple connections.

I'll come back to TripIt when I've had more chance to use it to its full potential.