Siteseeing - 12

TripIt

Right, so there’s a heckuva lot the prospective traveller can do online—that’s why Editor-san pays me the big bucks coffee money to write this little thingy for you every month—buy air tickets and hotel rooms, book cars or restaurant tables, view route maps, meet people, whatever. Thing is, by the time you’re done, you have one heckuva lot of e-threads to keep track of. This services does that for you. Just mail an e-booking to plan@tripit.com, and then, as you finalise stuff, mail all your other confirmations to it too. It then sorts all those confusing bits and bytes, and gives you, just like that, a ready-made itinerary, adding for good measure, links to check-ins, maps, weather, photos where available, and so on. Of course you can log in and chop and change all you want, even let friends in, so they can, for example, figure out when you’re free to be taken out for a drink. Limitations: the service providers it “recognises” are mainly from North America and Europe. So, if you want to use it elsewhere (or with more obscure services in the West) you will have to a certain amount of manual filling in. Right now, I’m taking bets: will TripIt cover our part of the world soon? Or will some desi quickly do a rip-off painted in the tricolour?

Published in Outlook Traveller, Mumbai edition, November 2007.

Tags: Outlook Traveller, Siteseeing