These are the 3 best apps to help you manage your travel itinerary
Travelers who once required cumbersome dossiers or Tracy Flick-esque personal assistants can now manage complex itineraries with simple, often free mobile apps. Digital travel innovations include everything from niche services, such as airport whisperer GateGuru, to flexible archival systems with excellent travel potential (Evermore, we are looking in your direction). These are three of our favorite apps geared specifically at consolidating, managing and generally making sense of travel itineraries:
TripIt
How it works: Upon registration, users either forward hotel, airline, car rental and entertainment confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com to populate a consolidated itinerary; or, TripIt can monitor members' inboxes for pertinent information from the usual travel-booking suspects (Orbitz, Kayak, etc.) as well as auxiliary sites such as StubHub or OpenTable. In both cases, the app syncs its data with users' calendars, and creates digital itineraries that can be viewed on mobile devices, tablets and on the web, or even printed.
Bells, whistles: The itinerary includes pertinent minutia like flight gates and movie lengths, and socially minded travelers can easily share itineraries with colleagues, friends and curious Twitter followers. An odometer-like feature on TripIt's website also calibrates miles traveled, for those who keep track of that sort of thing.
Price: Free
WorldMate
How it works: WorldMate does not crawl your inbox; instead, users send booking confirmations to a general WorldMate email, which consolidates your hotel, flight and transportation information into one itinerary. Users can also access hotel and airfare booking sites like Kayak through the app to make last-minute changes.
Bells, whistles: Handy extras include a currency converter, world travel clocks, weather forecasts and the aforementioned LinkedIn integration.
Price: The app is free, can be accessed as a web page or via mobile device. A Gold version ($9.99) includes calendar sync, real-time flight alerts, and the creepy but useful ability to monitor colleagues' travel itineraries.
TripCase
How it works: After creating an account via Facebook or email, users either forward booking confirmations to a designated TripCase email account, or manually fill out all their reservation information in tabs labeled flights, lodging, transportation and even restaurants.
Bells, whistles: Maps for destinations and hotel check-in/out information. The app interface can be viewed two ways, action or timeline, and the former has options such as weather updates and emailing your itinerary to others.
Price: Free.