I travel on business. A lot. Keeping all the details straight (and making them available to others) is a challenge. So I’ve started playing with Tripit, which is very cool. The premise is simple – wouldn’t it be nice to have all the details in one place, where they are maintained and easy to get to – anytime – with a browser? And wouldn’t it be even better if the details got imported easily, without you doing a whole lot of typing? Tripit does that, and more. 
You make a reservation: on an airline web site, a rental car company, a hotel. Usually, at the end, you’re offered the opportunity to send an email to someone. That’s all you need: send it to plans@tripit.com, and their parser figures it out and builds an itinerary. I’ve done it with three separate transactions and it weaves them together seamlessly. In seconds it’s all there. Way cool.
There’s more. It’s a social network: you can see where and when your friends are or will be. You can designate people as always in your network (my wife, my business agent) and add individuals for specific trips. You can add more travel details manually. You get maps, directions and other suggestions. It displays terms you might need to know about reservations. And other stuff I haven’t started to use yet.
It’s not perfect. I’m trying to integrate a feed from it into Google Calendar, and the documented process results in creating a second calendar. Yes, I can view both at once, but for some reason the synch with my Blackberry won’t pick up the second calendar (the Tripit one.) A request for help got a quick response, some of which was of the “read the FAQs” variety, but quickly turned into much better communication, but ultimately didn’t help. And although Tripit provides code for putting your travel calendar on your website or blog – which looks great on sites where I’ve seen it – my blog template (this WordPress one you’re in right now) doesn’t support javascript. For now, no solution to that problem is planned.
I’m whining. It’s free, for goodness sake. They’re small, and they’re going as fast as they can, I suspect. These are minor problems, that may be soluble (if you have broken the code, please – do tell. Leave a comment and I’ll update this post.) Check this one out. It’s helping me a lot. Hope it helps you too.