The do-it-yourself world of booking trips today sometimes leaves travelers deluged with airline schedules, hotel and car-rental confirmations and restaurant-reservation details. Now, a flurry of services aim to let you manage all that on your smartphone.
There are several tools that say they’ll organize your on-the-road life and make travel easier. But some work better than others. We put the three leading services—TripIt, WorldMate and TripCase—to a test.
Some of the services link up with social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook so people can track each other’s comings and goings. They also are increasingly being offered via major corporate travel sellers like American Express Co. and Carlson Wagonlit.
“Travel and mobile technology are now coming together,” said Nadav Gur, commercial officer and founder of WorldMate Inc., which is the largest of the services with five million users, most of them on BlackBerrys.
With each service, you can forward confirmations from airlines, hotels and other travel companies to an email address—[email protected], [email protected] or [email protected]. (The services know where to route your information because you first have to register your email address.) Then they compile an itinerary. If you’re booking through one of the services’ corporate travel partners, confirmations can be sent automatically.
The services can send alerts about flight status and gate changes, and let you book new flights or search for hotel rooms on the fly. They are working toward more advanced messaging capabilities, like shooting travelers hotel directions when they need them. This can happen automatically since the travel service knows where you are, based on the phone’s position, and where you’re going, based on your itinerary.
“I think the generation that is growing up with mobile devices is changing even how they take trips. Not everything is planned out as much,” said John Samuel, senior vice president of Sabre Travel Studios, a unit of Sabre Holdings Corp.
Both TripIt and WorldMate will scan your LinkedIn contacts and send messages when someone you know is in the same city.
Two of the services charge a fee to inform you about flight delays and gate changes. TripCase offers alerts and alternative flights for free, but only if your trip was booked through the Sabre reservation system. The company hopes to add other major reservation systems in the future, and TripCase says it will offer its own “Pro” version with extra features for a fee this summer.
My suggestion: You can avoid paying for updates by signing up for alerts from your airline and from FlightStats.com, a highly accurate service that is free.
In several months of using all three services, here’s how they performed:
TripIt: TripIt—which I tested with an Android phone—proved to be the fastest and most accurate at compiling itineraries. With a complicated family trip for a college graduation, for example, TripIt compiled plane reservations on different days for nine different members of my extended family, figured out multiple bookings at the same hotels and even added a restaurant reservation booked through OpenTable.com.
TripIt began in 2007 largely as a Web-based service for leisure travelers. But the company is moving more towards business travel, says co-founder Scott Hintz. It has signed deals with corporate travel agencies, for example, to make it easier to integrate itineraries into TripIt and electronic calendars. But for now, TripIt trails WorldMate among business-travel users.
WorldMate: WorldMate was close to TripIt in accuracy when compiling itineraries. It figured out almost everything I threw at it. For our big family trip, however, it separated one branch of the family into a different itinerary. On another trip, a booking wasn’t understood and so was put in an “Unassigned Items” category.
On my BlackBerry, WorldMate easily integrated reservations into my Outlook calendar, and took appointments from Outlook and spliced them into itineraries.
Mr. Gur of WorldMate says his service usually opts to send the most severe option when different information sources have different data on flights—the longest flight delay estimate, for example—and tries not to send incorrect information. Unsure of which terminal, it didn’t suggest one or the other.
TripCase: TripCase couldn’t identify the restaurant reservation. Instead, it sent me an email saying it was “unable to verify hotel address.” On all the other confirmations, TripCase created a new “trip” for each booking rather than consolidate reservations into an itinerary. It’s a different kind of experience—the information gets to TripCase, and you have to compile your own itinerary by “merging” reservations together. And to merge bookings into one trip, you have to use TripCase’s website rather than your smartphone app. (I used my Android phone for the test.)
TripCase is definitely more labor intensive. Some may prefer the automation of TripIt and WorldMate.
TripCase said it went with the manual approach because it thought customers might be upset if it made incorrect decisions about what goes where. “It’s better to give the customer control rather than inferring,” Mr. Samuel said.
One task confused all three: emailing a reservation cancellation. Instead of removing the flight I canceled from an itinerary, all three added it as a new (duplicate) reservation.
All three say they are working on fixes.
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The Wall Street Journal (abridged)
WATANI International
20 June 2010