Business Travel and organization

Keeping track of you travel itineraries while on the go can be very complex. Carrying about printouts of hotel confirmations, flight information, transportation requirements and other trip essentials can be downright frustrating and risky. After all, losing those pieces of paper leaves you at the mercy of the hotel, airline, and can put in arrears in a hurry.

Lately I have been using two different business travel tools, WorldMate Live and TripIt.

Each has mobile applications that assist in keeping track of itineraries. Merely email your official itinerary from any number of air carriers, hotels, or travel agents and your itinerary automatically updates. Once the itinerary is loaded you will be able to view your travel plans via the mobile application or any web browser.

http://www.worldmate.com/blackberry/
http://www.tripit.com/uhp/blackberry

From the mobile app you can quickly find:

• Dates and times of flights and hotels bookings
• confirmation numbers (as long as they were included in your confirmation letter
• accommodation names
• Maps (based on addresses included in confirmations

For the most part they both provide the promised itinerary details, well and serve their need. So it comes down to the other value-adds.

In this I prefer the Worldmate Mobile for its:

• currency converter (3 currencies simultaneously)
• world clock (4 cities at a time)
• weather look-up
• hotel booking (direct from hotels.com)

TripIt is a little quicker with the loading of new itineraries, and has more social networking plug-ins (if you care), and an online calender that Outlook or other iCal or *.ics feed readers. This means that you automatically get the itinerary added to your Calendaring application. Pretty handy.

Maybe in a few thousand more miles I will have a better read on which is better, but for now they each have their merits, Worldmate on my BB and TripIt on the web.