Dot Com Note

Tripit is a travel organization site that just came out of private-invitation-only memberships. It is now open for anyone to sign up. It is an interesting site for do-it-yourself trip planners. You organize all your travel related website bookmarks, travel plans and itineraries in one place. In addition to printing your itinerary, you can also share it with your social network.

Tripit calls it the first intelligent travel organizer. It draws information from Google maps for directions, NOAA weather services, SeatGuru for airplane seat advice, Wikipedia for city information, Eventful for current event, and Flickr for city photos. It is the ultimate mashup wrapped into an intelligent travel organizer system.

After you sign up, you download and install a toolbar extension called TripClipper. As you browse different travel related sites, you clip things like restaurant, activities, reviews, etc. and add those to your trip plan using the TripClipper. You create a trip plan for each trip and add contents from different sites to your trip plan.

You can comparison shop different reservation websites from within TripIt for flights, hotels, and car rentals. Once you purchase your trip from a site, you email the information to plans@tripit.com. The system stores and organizes your information in a trip plan.

There are lots of other features and some of them will amaze you. Economist has mentioned this site in the context of semanatic web.