TripIt for Business Travelers

TripIt is company I wrote about some time ago who offers an online trip planning service. They recently contact me regarding the new services they aim to provide to business travelers. We at the Business Travel Logue love anything that makes trip planning easier, so I had to check it out.

According to the press release,

TripIt is an online travel assistant that seamlessly organizes trips including flight, hotel, rental car, train, restaurant reservations, and activities —even when booked through different online services and vendors. Business travelers simply forward their individual travel confirmation emails to plans@TripIt.com and TripIt automatically builds a master online itinerary that combines all their bookings.

This is, incidentally, no different than the service they’ve been providing. It’s just branded for us, the business travelers. The service provides you with all of your itinerary details, confirmation numbers, daily weather (that’s handy), local maps, driving directions, city guides, OpenTable restaurant reservations. You can add notes about your clients and meetings, like “remember to ask Fred about his new baby” or whatever. The information can be shared with your friends, family and colleagues, so you’ll never be out of touch.

One of the beautiful things about TripIt is that you can access all of your travel information from the web or your web enabled mobile phone. That makes for a nice backup if you spill a Starbucks on your paperwork, or some other sort of disaster befalls you enroute. Your plans are automatically synced with your calendar, so you don’t have to deal with all of the tedium of entering your information.

Whose using this service? TripIt has quite a lot to brag about, with clients including Apple, Deloitte, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. If it’s good enough for Billy Gates, it’s probably good enough for you.

TripIt supports all the major online travel and business travel sites like Expedia Corporate, Orbitz for Business and Travelocity Business. TripIt also supports larger traditional travel agencies like American Express, BCD and Carlson Wagonlit, as well as the top online corporate booking tools Cliqbook, GetThere and Travelport.

Depending on your preference, the company can process confirmation emails formatted as HTML, plain text, PDF files, or include embedded links to itinerary sites such as Sabre VirtuallyThere.

Closeness Alerts are a fun feature offered by TripIt. These alerts notify you when your travel plans overlap with fellow travelers while on the road or when your colleagues are near your hometown. Then you could get together with your friends for dinner, instead of eating at the bar alone…

Travel managers can use this tool to save themselves a lot of time. They can easily make changes if needed AND they can see a calendar with the location of all of their associates in one place. Very cool.

More information about TripIt’s services for business travelers can be found at https://business.tripit.com