How to use the TripIt! app [THE NEWBIE’S GUIDE]

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How to use TripIt!, An Application For Travel Beginners

I want to share how to use the Tripit! app to make your travel planning less painful.  I’m a planner.  I like to have all of my flight, hotel, and activity confirmations in one place where I can access them at any time.  Before, I used the calendar feature of Microsoft Outlook. I didn’t have an issue with preparing my itinerary this way. That is until I found a quicker and easier way to do it. Enter the app, TripIt!

You can input all of your information via their website by opening an account at TripIt. You can even give TripIt permission to auto import travel plans from your email inbox (you can remove this option at any time).

When you receive confirmations of your airline, hotel, and tour bookings via email, TripIt will automatically scan your inbox and capture those bookings into your TripIt account. Each screenshot that you see below was automatically scanned into my account when TripIt discovered it in my Gmail.

Let Tripit! do all of the data entry for you

The only time you will have to key in data is when you make a direct reservation over the phone and get a verbal confirmation. I use the free version of TripIt because it does pretty much everything that I require, and I’m…um….budget minded.

Once you have created an account, you can begin to start inputting your itinerary.  At the top right of the page, you will see a menu bar.

Click on “Add a trip.”  You can key in your destination city and your trip dates.  You may decide to assign a name to your trip or share it with your travel partner(s).

Fine tune it by adding specific details to your itinerary

Next, you can select if it’s a business or leisure trip then you can click the “Create Trip” button.  Your new trip itinerary page will show a calendar of the dates of the trip.  You may click on a date then select an appropriate category: flight, hotel, restaurant or activity reservations.

Continue until you have captured all of the pertinent information for your trip from your confirmation emails.  You may copy/paste everything to be sure. But I highly recommend that you allow TripIt access to your email.  Go to your account/settings/about you to do this.  Granting access will enable them to plug in the info for you.  Essentially, this is how to use the TripIt! app to your advantage.

I decided to stay at an airport hotel since our flight was early in the morning. I know you’re asking why I would spend $106.00 on a hotel when I didn’t have to? It was close to the airport, so we didn’t have to fight through rush hour traffic. We had a free breakfast and a free ride to the airport in a shuttle. With our “Park, Sleep, and Fly” reservation, we got up to two weeks of free parking on site. When you compare that to what the park and fly lots charge for ten days, we made the right decision.

I like to detail the hotel’s checkout time, too. It allows a smooth transition from the hotel to the airport so that I can get to my gate in a timely fashion.  We were able to enjoy an excellent breakfast before taking the shuttle to our American Airlines gate.

TripIt! left no stone unturned when copying my confirmation email to the itinerary. I used miles to get from ATL-MIA-LIM-SCL-IPC-LIM-MIA-ATL, hence the ridiculously small fare, which was the airline fee (SCORE!!!!).  There was a six-hour layover in Miami. We chose to spend our downtime in the Delta Airlines Crown room (we got a free pass for opening an AMEX Delta Gold card) surfing the net, eating and having a cocktail or two.

TripIt! takes all of the worries out of traveling

We arrived at the first leg of our trip, Lima, Peru, early the next morning.  All of our itinerary info for Lima was ‘automagically’ inserted into TripIt for us.

TripIt will offer maps to get you from point A to point B. Since we were meeting our driver at ground transportation, there was no need to utilize it.

We would be arriving way before check in, but I made sure to notify them via email that I would be coming in the wee hours of the morning.  They were ok with it since there is always someone at the front desk.

I booked the reservation via Expedia, and when the confirmation email arrived, TripIt was to the rescue again, plugging in all of the itinerary info into my account.

In our attempt to travel cheaply, we settled on a hostel for Lima. It was more than adequate; we got free breakfast and coffee too. The front desk clerks and housekeeping were exceptional even when we were locked inside our room for two hours! That’s a long story that I will have to write about sometime in the future.

TripIt! will add any planned activities to your overall Itinerary

I had booked two tours before leaving home, and those tours were added into TripIt.  I left one day free in between where we could spend the day getting to know the city.

Next, we detailed the hostel departure date and time.  Also, the second leg of our trip from Lima to Santiago, Chile is mentioned here along with info on the apartment we rented.  Again, we had a driver, so directions to the apartment were unnecessary.

Day trips planned?  TripIt! has you covered!

We got there relatively late in the day, so we went next door to buy groceries.  There was a tour early the following day, so we spent the day getting to know the city.  We took a day trip to Valparaiso the next morning.  I decided to copy/paste info about the city that I found on the lonely planet site into the itinerary.

Note that next to the date, they show the weather forecast for that particular day.

We had to determine when we needed to leave the apartment to catch the third leg of our trip to Easter Island.  The flight was slightly early, and since only there were only two flights a week, we could not miss it.  This tidbit of information is where knowing how to use the TripIt! app comes in handy.  It allows you to see how your reservations impact one another at a single glance.

Finally, we see the departure from the hostel on Easter Island along with the first leg of the return to our hometown of Atlanta.

To get started on learning how to use the TripIt! app, you can download it free.  It’s compatible with Android, iPhone, Blackberry, Windows 7+, and iPad in iTunes or Google Play.

Upgrading to the premium option

There are several premium options available to you as a TripIt Pro ($49.00 per year) user that you might find useful like: