TripIt Travel Organizer and Flight Track Pro

I saw over on AndroidTapp that they were reviewing TripIt, and it made me wonder why the hell I have been using this program for about two months and never said a single word about it.

I travel almost incessantly for work, sometimes for five weeks at a time, but usually 10-14 days. This app is well worth it and almost invaluable to me when I travel, especially combined with Flight Track Pro.

Here is the description from AndroidTapp.com:

Features:

TripIt Android App is an extension of the popular travel organization website TripIt.com. If you’re not familiar with TripIt, it’s a great website for travelers that conveniently organizes travel itineraries why adding a social aspect to it sharing recent travels with friends. They offer a premium service that allows you to receive alerts if your flight may be canceled or departure gate changed at the last minute.

The app however is fairly limited yet very useful for how it organizes travel itineraries in an easy to read fashion with icons versus a huge block of ugly text you typically get from your itinerary confirmation emails. Each line item can be drilled down into further detailed to give you a booking details, directions to/from your airport or hotel via Google Maps, estimated hotel check-in/check-out times, and more.

If you have friends using TripIt, you can see their shared travels as well as you can share your travels or not. The shared data consists of sharers’ name, to & from destinations and the miles racked up.

TripIt also offers a subscription service which keeps track of your flight changes, status, gate changes, etc. However, you can get Flight Track Pro for just a few dollars and it automatically will pull your itineraries from TripIt and place them in Flight Track just like the more expensive subscription service. Flight Track also has a widget, and the ability to notify you in the notification message bar when flights change, get delayed, when the gate changes, etc.

Before I was rushing to the sign on my connections that tells you what gate the flight has moved to or not, wasting valuable minutes when you are talking about major airports like O'Hare, DFW, Atlanta, etc. Now I just pull up my Flight Track which pulls from my TripIt and I don't have to sweat it.

The best part about the TripIt/Flight Track combo? It's literally too easy to set up. You sign up for an account with TripIt and sign in. It will ask you to authorize the app in your browser (like when you have to authenticate Flickr or Facebook).

Once you get an account set up, you simply send your travel plans to plans@tripit.com. Within (usually) about 10 seconds, your travel plans are populated into the TripIt and Flight Track programs (provided you have them running).

From there, everything else is automatic. You don't have to change anything...

Now, I work for the government and we use SATO travel. I thought for sure that they wouldn't recognize the PDF document attachment that they send me (auto generated) but sure enough, they do.

Here is a list of travel plans that Trip It supports.

If you travel a lot, there is literally no reason you shouldn't be using these programs. For the cost of a Starbucks coffee or two you could be saving yourself countless minutes at the airport, and having to drag around less paperwork.