Tracking my travel calendar

Now that I am going to be traveling more, I figured it would be good to get organized. My primary goal was to use an online system that I can enter my travel arrangements and have access to them anywhere. An additional bonus would be for the system to facilitate people I know to see that I am in the area. I didn't want to spend a ton of time on this, so I looked at a couple I was already familiar with. I already had accounts in both Dopplr and TripIt, primarily because I knew people who sent me invites from each in the past.

I was happy to see that both could pull in connections from LinkedIn, which is what I use for my social networking. Dopplr offered to pull connections from Twitter, Flickr and Facebook where TripIt did not. They both worked with Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo for connections as well. I wish there was some tight integration with LinkedIn so I could just add a gadget or something, but you can't have everything.

It was when I started entering in my travel information that I made my decision to go with TripIt. I was able to enter the airline and flight number to see the exact times for the flight displayed. Additionally, TripIt gave me the ability to add plans to my trip, like a restaurant, meeting, etc... The ability to store more information is never a bad thing. The only real problem I ran into was when I had an event that started at 6pm and ended at 2am. The end time had to be after the start time, so I had to put 11:59 p.m instead of it recognizing that the activity was past midnight. No, I don't normally stay out to the wee hours of the morning, but I had one instance where it came up. Anyway, it is a small issue and I can live with it.

So now I can access the website to see my reservation numbers and even store the booking agent information. I have connections to people and we can see when we are close to one another. As you may have noticed, I can put my information on my blog page too. My final step was to get this information on my BlackBerry. TripIt creates an iCal feed that my Google Apps calendar can consume. I added the feed and once my BlackBerry updated my calendar using Google Sync all my information was at my fingertips. All in all, I think it will be a great help and I hope it meets my needs in the long term.