TripIt now syncs your travel plans to calendars, mobile phones

Personal travel aggregation service TripIt has received a very important update this morning. It's now able to sync up travel plans that are sent its way to a handful of popular calendaring tools including Google Calendar, Apple iCal, Plaxo, Outlook, or any other service that can handle URL events. What this means for you as the traveler, is that if you're sent a change notice from whatever travel service you booked with, TripIt will spit that out to both your e-mail and your linked-up calendars, saving you the bother of having to manually go in and make changes.

While this may not seem groundbreaking to the casual traveler who travels once every few months, frequent travelers and those who have booked multiple services at once will benefit with the addition of automatic scheduling changes, and the option to rely on their existing scheduling tools.

Since we last covered TripIt in September, the company has launched its mobile service that lets you ping TripIt with an e-mail or text message containing various command codes to have it send information back to you. The most useful one is for the time, date, and confirmation code of your flight, although equally useful is another that lets you pull up your itinerary, or any other notes you've added. They've also got codes to get maps and directions based on the places listed in your itinerary.

I still have to side with Rafe's sentiments that this service would be best served in conjunction with other travel purchase sites. While it's not exactly tough to copy TripIt in with your confirmation e-mails, it would be much nicer to simply click a checkbox at the point of purchase. The move towards integrating it with existing communication mediums like phones and calendars is definitely a step in the right direction, though.

To automate getting calendar updates sent to you, just add one of TripIt's new calendar feeds to any service that supports URL events. Seen here is Google Calendar.

(Credit: TripIt Inc.)