I’ve been playing with Tripit.com lately, it’s a startup with a really clever but simple approach to travel planning. You don’t even have to register, just forward the confirmation e-mails that you get from airlines, car rental agencies, Orbitz, Travelocity, Amtrak, Eurostar and other travel companies and websites to [email protected]. Tripit parses the e-mails, including attached PDFs, and builds an itinerary for you, complete with historical temperatures, maps, and links to information about your destinations from Wikipedia and other sites. For flights, Tripit adds links to check flight status and to check-in. Itineraries are editable and you can add notes. The first time you send an email to Tripit you get a reply with a link to verify your account. Verification is extremely simple, just enter your name and choose a password and you’re all signed up. Now that’s ease of use!
If you add your family and friends to Tripit they can share your itineraries and you’ll get “Closeness Messages” from Tripit when you cross paths with friends, just like you do with Dopplr.
Tripit Has a lot of alternate ways to use and share your travel data including Atom feeds of your trips and alerts and a “Tripit To Me” email bot that responds to commands like “get trip”
There’s also an iCalendar server. iCalendar is the protocol used by Apple’s iCal but it’s also an open standard and is supported by many applications including Google Calendar, Microsoft Works 2008 and Outlook 2007, Mozilla Sunbird/Lightning, Zimbra, and KDE KOrganizer. I found it very easy to add Tripit to both Outlook and Google Calendar. If you are using Outlook clicking on an iCalendar link in a web page or email adds it to your Outlook Calendar. With Google, it’s Settings > Calendars > Add Calendar > Add by URL I was a little disappointed that iCalendar doesn’t provide bidirectional synchronization, Tripit’s iCalendar items in Outlook or Google Calendar are read-only, you have to to go back to Tripit to edit an itinerary, but changes do get pushed back to the copy in Outlook or Google.
Tripit is useful for travel research too. You can create scrapbooks of notes and links about places you’d like to visit using a TripClipper bookmarklet. When you’re planning a trip you can include items from your scrapbook. The bookmarklet works in Opera Mini (and probably Opera Mobile and IE Mobile) too. I’ve added it to my Opera Mini Bookmarklets page which makes it easy to add bookmarlets to Mini. Another cool tool is Tripit’s Trip Search which automates comparison shopping for fares and accommodations by submitting travel details to multiple online booking sites.
Tripit recently launched a mobile site at m.tripit.com. The mobile version is currently pretty limited. It gives you read-only access to your itineraries, displays “Closeness Alerts” and lets you share trips by email. That’s better than nothing, but I’d really like to see Tripit flesh out the mobile features. Travel is by definition a mobile activity, when I travel my phone is my PC. Travel plans change, even in the middle of a trip, but none of the Tripit features that are usable with a phone (feeds, iCalendar integration, “Tripit To Me”, mobile web site) let you plan or edit trips. I tried using the full Tripit.com site in Nokia’s WebKit, Opera Mobile 8.65 and Opera Mini 4.1 and I was able to view the site and enter some trip details, but critical tasks including adding flights were impossible. The PC site is loaded with clever JavaScript widgets that work nicely in Firefox but are just too much for any of the full web mobile browsers to handle. I suspect the iPhone would have no problems with Tripit.com. Any iPhone owners want to try it and leave a comment?
Tripit Mobile Ratings: Content: 
Usability: 
Related:
m.tripit.com and 70 other mobile travel sites are featured in the Travel-Transit section of the WapReview Mobile Directory and YesWap.com mobile portal.
WapReview Blog – Bookmarklets for Opera Mini
A very, very clever service – but it’s not quite there yet. I’m playing with it on an SPV Pocket PC and it’s pretty rough around the edges. Yet another application that would make so much more sense if it were made native to mobile devices, rather than treating them as an after thought. Don’t want to sound ungrateful, just hope they get it sorted.
That scrapbooking feature is phenomenal. I think I will use it to go back and add to the recent trips we have taken. My entire family is now using this feature. Truly a great program.
Dennis,
i have tried using your browser’s zoom function to make the fonts smaller but not getting any results.
Porter,
It sounds like the problem is on Trippit’s end so there’s not much you or I can do.
Have you tried using your browser’s zoom function to make the fonts smaller?
I think there might be some utilities for changing the fonts on s60, though I haven’t tried any of them.
Ultimately, I think you will need to bug Tripit about it. Send them a screenshot.
Or you could always use Opera Mini.
Hi Dennis, i am still experiencing the fronts problem.Can you solve this matter.
AC,
Yes that’s Opera Mini in the images. I get the same site using my S60 Nokia N95-3 too. I actually tried to find an iPhone version of Tripit by changing the user agent in Firefox and always got the same one as with any other UA, mobile or not. Maybe Tripit dropped their browser detection. Are you still experiencing the fonts problem?
Those screen grabs were taken using Opera Mini, right? On my s60 smartphone I keep getting re-directed to the iPhone-optimized version of the site, with monstrously large fonts.
I sent the Tripit folks some feedback about this — hopefully they’ve listened; this smaller version of the site is much more readable.
Oh, and it’s a great service, BTW :-)