One of my peeves when travelling is paperwork – keeping tabs on flights, hotel reservations, car hires. Rotten. A site that I’ve grown to love is Tripit.com which makes travelling that little bit easier. Once you create an account on the site you can then create your travel plans making sure all your details are stored on Tripit. Then either visiting the website or using the free iPhone application you can easily access your travel plans – goodbye paper.

What makes life even easier is that Tripit can automatically scan your confirmation e-mails for details of flight times, confirmation numbers etc. All you need to do is forward your e-mail to plans@tripit.com and the details will be automatically added to your trip. I had my doubts about how reliable this would be but it’s been fantastic – reliable and makes the whole trip entry painless. You can edit the imported trip if there’s an error and you can flag the error to Tripit so they can improve their import algorithms.

I’ve already mentioned the iPhone app but you can also share out your trip’s vis RSS, iCal feed, blog badge and also by adding friends. Yes, Tripit also has it’s own social network. See where your colleagues and friends are at any time. There’s also a league table to see who’s been doing the most travelling, something I don’t want to be winning. Tripit has a pro option costing $69 a year which will track various travel point and loyalty schemes, send you alerts if your flight times change and includes an inner circle feature which will give automatic access to your trips to everyone in your circle.

Finally, Tripit is supported by many other applications and websites which make it easier to create and share your Trips. Overall it’s hard to find Tripit – a free and useful service for the frequent traveller.