Travel, they say, teaches tolerance. But planning a trip can be quite chaotic. Coordination with friends and family, checking out airfares and hotel options can be timeconsuming and exhausting.
The internet — with its innumerable deals, vacation packages and other travel tidbits can aid the decision-making process. But, it can add to the complexity. Sonia Mehra, a mother of two from Mumbai, agrees.
“Organizing travel is an impossible task. Every year, I decide to start early and surf for possibilities, look for kid-friendly places and other travel tips. But soon it turns into a clutter of disorganized info r m at i o n trapped within word documents and book marks which I never manage to take with me,” says Mehra.
But this year is different because Mehra discovered an online travel organization tool called Trip It. “It’s a website that puts all my travel-related data in one place including travel bookings, hotels, flight timings and even all my other research on food and places to visit,” she says.
There are many like Mehra, for whom travel organization tools on the net make planning relatively hassle-free. And they are genuinely free. For instance, on signing up with Trip It, all the user has to do is to forward all travel-related confirmation emails (such as reservations from airlines, hotels etc.) to the site.
The tool then stitches together all the pertinent details from these emails and builds a neat, date-wise itinerary , complete with weather forecasts, maps of the destination cities and other interesting tidbits about the place.
The tool also lets you add notes to each itinerary, share them with family and friends and even allows the flight status to be checked directly from the website.
And if you’d rather not lug your laptop around, a mobile version is available.
A similar site for travel organization is Travel Muse. This site also has unique travel and user-generated content that can come in handy especially if you haven’t yet decided where to travel.
One of its features ‘Inspire Me’ provides suggestions based on the kind of trip you want.
But if you aren’t fond of copypaste, there is another option that will work from within your browser.
Gliider is a firefox plugin that allows you directly to drag and drop travel information from the webpages you visit. It’s simple to install and just sits on top of the browser, giving users a pop-out trip planner box.
The tool also automatically creates folders for each type of information, including flights, hotels, places to see and food. The plug-in lets you create customized folders for additional information .
As it is integrated with the browser, you just need to highlight any pertinent information you come across while surfing and drag and drop it into your planner box. Once the item is in the organizer, you can insert comments for each item. Once you’ve finished the planning process, the tool emails everything as a PDF file, so all you have to do is take a print-out and you’re all set to go.
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