A few pointers…

With so many new TripIt users on the site (thank you!), I thought now was a good time to address some of the most common issues newbies, and even the occasional TripIt veteran, run into.  So here are a few pointers that I’d like to share with the world…

1.       Merging accounts.  People who are trying TripIt for the first time often send us a booking from their work email address, and then another from their personal account, and then they realize they now have two separate TripIt accounts.  No worries, though – it’s easy to merge multiple accounts together.  Just log into whichever TripIt account you want to be the “keeper” and go to the My Account page.  In the “email accounts” section of the page, you’ll see a link for merging accounts.  Click that link and the rest should be self explanatory.

2.       Moving items to different trips.   If you want to move a hotel, a map, or anything else from one of your trips to another, just click the “move” link you’ll see in the upper right corner of that item.  Select where you want to move the trip to, and you’re done.  Easy, huh?

3.       Changing display order within a trip. TripIt displays items in your trip according to date and time.  If you want to move things around, just click the “edit” link for an item and on the next page you can change the date or time to whatever you want.

4.       “Missing” days in a trip.  For each day in a trip, TripIt usually displays a horizontal bar that shows the date, the weather, and an “add plans” button (we call it the “day bar”).  But if your trip has a gap of 7 days or more with no scheduled plans, we don’t show all those blank day bars in order to reduce clutter in the itinerary.  You can still create items on those “missing” days by clicking the “add plans” button at the top of the itinerary page and then specifying any date you want for the new item you create.

5.       Your itinerary on a PDA/mobile device.  We are working on new and better ways to carry your TripIt information with you, other than paper printouts.  But in the meantime, if you just want a text based version of your itinerary in your mobile device, send us a TripIt To Me command.  From your mobile device email, send to plans@tripit.com a message with “get trip [date]” in the body, where the date is something like 3/15/08 (or 15/3/08 outside the U.S.) and which matches one of the trips in your account.  We’ll email you back right away with your itinerary.

6.       Manual entry.  TripIt is constantly expanding our list of supported sites for importing your bookings at plans@tripit.com.  But in those cases where you’ve booked on a site we don’t yet support, you can always enter your information manually – surprisingly, we sometimes find out that TripIt users aren’t aware of that option!  I know it’s not as fun or easy as emailing to us, but we’ve tried to make it as painless as possible.  Just click “add plans,” select the type of travel you’d like to add, and you’re on your way.  In the case of flights, you just have to tell us the date, airline, and flight number, and we can usually automatically populate all the other details like airports, flight times, aircraft type, and more.  I told you we tried to make it easy!

Comments

[Tom]

I'd like to be able to make a restaurant reservation, add people from my Connections List to the reservation, and have it show up on their itineraries. This would operate similarly to adding an Activity, except that when adding attendees, you would just pick from your Connections List. Same goes for any type of Activity, whether it's a Meeting, Tour, Concert, or Theatre. The Attendees would be able to accept or decline the invitation. I think that this would add much value as a social networking tool.

[Scott Hintz]

Thanks for the suggestion, Tom.