As a frequent traveler, I’m always on the lookout for ways to make travel easier. There are several websites out there that claim to do just that, but my patience for trying out every new thing to hit the interwebs is low. But this year I’ve been trying out two sites which claim to help out with travel planning and organization, and there’s a clear winner between the two.
On the surface Dopplr and Tripit are similar – basically you tell the site about your upcoming travels and it will tell you when any of your friends will be in the same place as you are at the same time. It also organizes your travel info into an itinerary which it supplements with other info such as maps, weather, and things to do. You can decide who has access to your trip information and add other users as friends.
Both sites allow you to enter trip information manually, or you can forward your confirmation emails for flights, hotels, etc., and have the site extract the information itself. This feature is key, since I have no desire to perform data entry in order to use a site that is supposed to be making my life easier. TripIt does an infinitely better job with this feature than Dopplr does.
Dopplr seems to be more popular with other bloggers I know, but I’m not sure why. It has done a horrible job of interpreting travel emails. For example, I forwarded it my plane reservation for an upcoming trip to Dublin, and instead Dopplr decided I was going to From, Norway, for almost a year. For another trip Dopplr has me in Night, Canada, one day and Armonai, Lithuania, the next, when in fact I’ll be in Bavaria the whole time. Dopplr also thinks I spent a week in More, England, when in fact I was in Toulouse. Tripit got all those bookings right the first time.
I really like the itinerary presentation on TripIt. It includes vital info about flights and hotels, plus weather and maps for your destination. Flight listings include a handy button which links to the airline’s online check-in. TripIt also has an iPhone app which my husband loves.
Dopplr seems to focus on giving you other information about your destination – restaurant reviews, hotels, sites, etc. – and it encourages you to add your own reviews. Dopplr doesn’t present your itinerary in as useful of a format, but it does keep a copy of confirmation emails handy in case you need to look up information.
The only clear advantage I see to Dopplr is that as of now more people I know use it than use TripIt. This is important for the second big advantage of these sites, i.e. their ability to let me know when friends and I will be in the same place at the same time. A site needs a critical mass of users for this to really work. The easiest way for me to check to see if most of my friends will be in a certain place at the same time as me? Announcing an upcoming trip in my Facebook status.
I’ve been using both sites for about six months now, but I think I’m about to ditch Dopplr for good. Now if only I could get all my friends to sign up for TripIt.
Do you use any travel websites like these? What’s your opinion on them?
Hey! There is nothing wrong with going to Canada!
I ditto that, maybe you are set to see the olympics in person instead?
Dopplr seems to be more popular with other bloggers I know, but I'm not sure why. It has done a horrible job of interpreting travel emails.
Yeah, not really good at reading my Google Calendar's RSS feed for importing trips that way, either.
As to why it's more popular than Dopplr — not sure. When I signed up for it, I liked it immediatly due to its aesthetics, mostly. It was a clean and intuitive design. I'll take a look at TripIt though — I'm curious.
Hmm.
My initial impressions:
Clunkier to use than Dopplr.
Doesn't seem to play nice with Google Chrome, my browser of choice on Windows (haven't tried it out on Firefox or Safari on other platforms yet) — something about javascript onmouseover events, I'm guessing.
Does the calendar view of my contacts really not let me scroll past October 2009?
The ads seem more intrusive that those over on Dopplr.
I'm a fan of TripIt, myself. I've tried using Dopplr, but until they implement one-way trips, it's pretty useless for me.
I agree, nothing wrong with going to Canada. Except it's really far away, and I hate long flights…
Glad I convinced a few of you to sign up. Will be interested to hear more of your impressions.
Cliff – it scrolls past October for me. Maybe when you tried it none of your friends had trips planned for past then?
Please take a look at our new social travel site that just launched into public beta a couple of weeks ago — http://www.traxo.com.
No need to forwad e-mails or manually enter trips. You basically set it up one time, and it then goes out and AUTO-IMPORTS, and AUTO-UPDATES your trips (similar to what mint.com does in the financial services space) from any of the online travel sites where you've booked. We've invested heavily in our location normalizer and "TripBuilder" engine. Site is admitedly north-american centric, but we are in the process of adding many more supported sites and launching new features.
Please send us any feedback you have!
Rgds, Andres (Traxo co-founder)
Cliff – it scrolls past October for me.
Yeah, it does for me too — but only in MSIE6 (boo)…so add browser-compatibility (I use Chrome) to the list of grievances.
Dopplr feels smoother to me. I'm not sure how much of that is just looking smoother to me.
Yeah, that lack of browser compatibility sounds like a pain in the ass.
I've always liked TripIt's layout better, but maybe that's because I use it more often than I do Dopplr. It's more familiar.
With regards to Traxo, I completely disagree with the approach. I don't mind forwarding emails, as long as the service can properly decode them.
But I am not at all comfortable with giving a website my accounts and passwords for 30 other websites.