Tools for Tracking Your Trips

I fly one to three times a month.  I used to keep track of all my various itineraries by printing out the various airline, hotel and rental car reservations and keep them in my Franklin planner for the appropriate date.  I was all for a smarter way to do this when I learned about a couple of apps that will track all of these parts of a trip in a convenient easy-to-access way.   These are already known to a lot of frequent flyers, but I know there are a lot of my military readers that would love to have something like this available to them.

The first one that I tried was Tripcase.  This app works by you emailing your intenerary that you receive from the airline, hotel, or rental car company to Tripcase.  They have a program that will parse out the key data while associating your account with the email address you have sent it from.  They can even put together a single integrated intinerary from emailed reservations you send them from various companies.  So with their service, you can call up your trip from your smart phone and see all the various components of your trip in one integrated screen.  Pretty neat.  They even have an upgraded version called Tripcase Pro that is free until the end of the year.

The other app that I tried was Tripit.  Tripit does the same things as Tripcase, but adds on a couple of features that they don’t have.  To be fair, for these features you need to pay $45/year for their Tripit Pro version.  The features are a module that tracks all of your frequent flyer miles and points.  Handy to have it all in one place even though there are several other programs that will do this by them selves such as Award Wallet.  The second feature that I tried out was that the program will alert you if your purchased fare drops in price.  Most of the airlines will credit you the difference if the fare drops and you tell them about it.  I actually went almost the first full year that I purchased Tripit Pro without a single alert and was about ready to give up on it, when it alerted me to a $22 drop in a fare to Alaska that my wife and I bought.  I called and got a voucher for the $44 difference.  That paid me back for my investment so I continued the service.  Well see what the future brings there, but for now I am going with Tripit Pro.