Do you travel frequently? If you’re answer is no, then you may not be interested in this post. But if you’re answer is yes, then let me rock your world. When bouncing from airport to airport, sometimes on different carriers, it can be tough to keep up to date on flight delays, gate numbers, etc.
FlightTrack Pro from Mobiata gives a great interface for tracking ALL of your flight information. Combine it with TripIt and you get all of your flight info automatically entered. Read on to hear how!So first thing’s first. You’ve got to start using TripIt. What is TripIt and how does it work? It’s an automatic itinerary builder for all of your travel plans (car rentals, flights, hotel reservations, dinner plans, etc).
It’s simple – you know all of those confirmation e-mails you get from United, Marriott, Hilton, Continental, or whoever? You just forward those to a tripit e-mail address, and it parses those e-mails and builds a full calendar for you. It even creates a feed so you can subscribe to it via iCal, Outlook, Google Calendar, etc and have all of your travel plans automagically placed on your calendar! Seriously, this is a huge perk. TripIt is 100% free. They offer a “Pro” version for something like $60/year, but I can’t find a compelling reason to sign up for that.
You just forward it your confirmation e-mails, it parses them out, and it builds an itinerary… and it automatically separates and categorizes everything you’ve forwarded into trips!
VERY cool stuff. And like I mentioned earlier, it makes a feed that you can subscribe to from your calendar of choice. You get all of this functionality just from forwarding your confirmation e-mails. It gets better. TripIt has an API so other apps can link into your data. My app of choice is FlightTrack Pro for the iPhone.
Just like TripIt, all the flights are categorized by trips. Clicking a flight shows you all of the flight status information: delays, gate information, airport weather, a google map showing the flight’s path, etc. It really is very convenient. The best part is opening up the app and seeing all of your upcoming flights in there without every having to enter that data in anywhere.
To make things even better, FlightTrack Pro uses the iPhone alerting system to alert you of delays and other flight changes. This works fantastically well, and in my experience, I end up getting iPhone alerts before they make airport announcements or update their monitors. It’s that quick.
TripIt is free. FlightTrack Pro costs $9.99 on the app store. If you travel frequently, get both. They WILL make your travel life much more organized. I would pay for TripIt if i had to, but I’m very glad it’s free!
