Generally, I’m a very laid back traveler. When flying I’ll have the plane tickets booked in advance but often not much else. However right now I’m in the middle of planning a big trip – four people, two continents, three months. I’ll have people joining up and leaving again; planes, trains, cars and ferries to book; weddings and shows to get to; tourist sites to see and hopefully some time to chill as well.

So I’ve been looking for tools to help me get this all organised. The first I came across is TripIt.

My travel agent gave me my eticket details with a checkmytrip.com reservation number, so I logged into that website and called up the booking. I could email directly from there to plans@tripit.com, with my email address as the sender and all the details were automatically loaded into my trip for me with TripIts Itinerator. Pretty nice – it saved a lot of typing and playing around and it works with a large number of airlines and reservation agents.

TripIt also has a toolbar extension which allows you to clip websites and put directly into your trip plans. This isn’t as good as it could be – I’m spoiled by Google notebook which takes snapshots of the page and inputs the entire content rather than the link. Also TripIt inserts this information as unsorted notes – you have to go to your overall profile and put them manually into the specific trip and even then they remain unassociated with any specific journey or location.

The inbuilt travel guide is a work in progress. Currently it strips out Wikipedia entries on the destination, scours Flickr for photos and hooks up with Eventful to find out what’s happening when you’re there. This is a nice start and it will hopefully become more extensive in later versions.

Overall TripIt is a nifty web application for organising your journeys. The automatic creation of an itinerary just from forwarded emails is simple and quick and the ground work has been laid for a very extensive tool. It is still in it’s beta testing phase, so there will undoubtably be many more improvements made in later releases but already I’m quite happy with it.

Does anyone else use a different planning/organising tool? Let us know in the comments – I’m always after the “perfect” solution!