In practice, TripIt is pretty useful. I’ve used it on about four or five trips, and in all but one, the itinerary from the booking site was recognised. I’m not sure what happened with the one that wasn’t, but when I used them again about a month ago it was imported with not problems. If you book items from multiple sites, say you go to Expedia for your plane ticket, but Travelocity for your hotel and car rental, TripIt will figure out that they’re all on the same trip for you. You can also share the trips with multiple users and give them read or write access to the trip. In practice it’s pretty useful to have my wife and I both add things to the same place rather than e-mail things back and forth when preparing for a trip.

One of the best features is the print option. Once all your bookings are consolidated onto TripIt, it can generate a really nice looking printout that includes all the information, including driving directions, maps, confirmation numbers, and phone numbers for the entire agenda. It can be a lifesaver not having to search around for that restaurant phone number if you’re running late.

TripIt also has a mobile site that has improved greatly over the months I’ve been using it. It started with a fairly bland text based interface, but now it visually looks much better and is easy to navigate. My favorite feature is probably more of an iPhone feature than a TripIt one, but I love being able to click on the Google Map directions and have it open in Google Maps on my phone, with the directions ready to go. If you don’t have an iPhone, you still get a picture of the overall map with the text based directions.

One of the problems I’ve had with the site is slow iCal updating. I subscribe to my TripIt calendar feed on both Google Calendar and iCal on my Mac and they both take a little time to update the entries for the trip. When we were adding things to the agenda during the trip, I had to delete the subscription and re-add it on Google Calendar in order to force it to show up immediately. It does show up within an hour or so if you don’t do anything, but when you’re on a trip and you’re using it for organization, you’d like it to be quick.

Overall I give TripIt a good review. It’s a really useful site that seems to be heading in the right direction and I really like being able to have my calendar updated so easily with trip information.