A Review of TripIt Pro

Back at the beginning of November I got an email from TripIt offering a free trial of TripIt Pro; the invaluable travel site that I’ve become addicted to in recent months. At first I didn’t think I’d care all that much about the additional “Pro” offering, as the base subscription seemed to do everything I wanted it to; boy was I wrong.

The base subscription gives you the itinerary and trip management side of things, which is fabulous. I’ve sent it airline, conference, hotel and rental car confirmations and it has never made an error in the import of the travel data. You can also assign multiple email addresses to your profile, so if you book business travel using a business email address and personal travel using a personal email address you can forward confirmations from both accounts to TripIt. The trip “sharing” isn’t incredibly robust, but certainly suitable for giving family or friends access to your trip if they’re planning to pick you up at the airport (as an example). So when that email came in during a quiet evening in mid-November, I figured I’d give TripIt Pro a try. The pro subscription takes the same base itinerary and trip management, and adds several robust tools.

The Point Tracker has support for dozens of frequent flyer, rewards and other loyalty programs, and imports all of your miles/points into one resource. This certainly saves time from going to each airline or hotel site to make sure your miles/points posted to your account. In addition, the Point Tracker automatically calculates what you need to do to reach that next status tier. So instead of going over to the Continental website to see that you need 4,000 more miles or 2 more segments to make Silver, TripIt displays that information right inside the Point Tracker. If you’re one of those people with memberships to multiple programs, this feature is a godsend.

The second big key to the Pro subscription is travel alerts. TripIt Pro will text or email you to alert you of your flight status and any changes in that flight’s status, this includes everything from delays and cancellations to gate changes. This “seems” rather simple, but it takes it further with connection summaries. If you’re flying from City A to City B, then onto City C, you’ll get a connection summary shortly after landing in City B that tells you what gate you’re arriving at, what gate your next flight is departing from, the status of that flight, and the total time you have to make your connection. I can honestly say that since I’ve started using TripIt Pro, I don’t think I’ve looked at an airport departures monitor at all. I’m not sure what source TripIt uses for their data (whether it’s an FAA/ATC datastore, or individually from each airline), but in the few weather delays I’ve experienced I received the TripIt flight delayed message before the agents at the gate updated gate displays or made any announcements (of course your personal mileage with this experience may vary-no pun intended). I haven’t been in extreme delays or cancellations since I signed up for TripIt Pro, but apparently it’ll go as far as to scout out alternative flight options for you in the event that your flight cancels; as one who used to work for an airline I’m seeing this as a huge perk that can save a lot of time in the customer service queue.

Most of the people I know who travel at least quasi-frequently are already TripIt users, but if you’re not a TripIt user or if you’ve been debating the Pro subscription, I certainly encourage you to give it a try. The days of printing out all of my itineraries, receipts and confirmations has all but disappeared; between the TripIt iPod/iPhone app, Android app, website, and mobile website, there’s almost no reason to lug around 20 pages of paper with you.