My beef with TripIt

[thewinchester]

I know there's quite a few fliers out there who use TripIt as part of planning and managing travel.

I've been using it for the past three years as a paid subscriber, and after planning a two week trip in Asia starting from tomorrow, there's a number of things about it which really annoy the heck out of me.

I've decided after months of waiting for TripIt to get its act together, trying to work with their support people to get simple but important improvements and fixes going, that enough is enough.

Their lack of action needs more of a public discussion and airing, particularly amongst the frequent flyer community who use their product. As such, I've written an article as part of my trip report, titled My beef with TripIt.

The article covers a selection of the most annoying bugs and user interface issues I come across while using the service. In having a vent about TripIt, I'd love to know what others think too.

Do you use it? Do you find the same problems? If you're a free user, is it good enough for you to upgrade? Do my issues sway your opinions of the site?

Love to hear your input and views, if only to work out if it's just a user experience person finding things nobody else is - or there is actually more to it and this is actually a real issue/annoyance for users.

[notzac]

I use TripIt, and have paid to do so as well. Agreed that it definitely has shortcomings (My current beef with them is the woeful implementation of schedule -> BB calendar in the BB mobile app), but at the end of the day -- it has saved my sanity more than once when it comes to complex itineraries. Having everything in the one place is also v nice; I just wish that airlines and hotels would use their API so that I could click a button to add a booking directly rather than waiting for the e-mail confirmation!

The only problem I've had with their "Itinerator" in the past was with a Qantas Holidays booking, which they seem to have fixed.

I've not tried WorldMate, so I don't know what it's like -- but maybe see if it handles things better for you?

[dazz81]

i love it. it is a fabulous tool and really shines in the USA when flying domestically.

[serfty]

Now I can set it to put everything automatically to "unfiled" then relocate item segments to the trip I want rather than where trip-it misconsiders it's ok.
'
No need to pay for anything.

I only use it for itineraries long or complex.

[Will]

I stopped using it 3 months ago given it's such a PITA when you make schedule changes. Have they fixed that yet?

[notzac]

I stopped using it 3 months ago given it's such a PITA when you make schedule changes. Have they fixed that yet?

Apparently: Flight Duplicates: Conflict Resolved - TripIt Blog

That said, it doesn't handle changes of airline so well .. not that I'd expect it to, but there you go.

[thewinchester]

Well, TripIt have responded officially to the points I've raised (see their comment at the link(. Sadly, I don't think their VP for Product has dug deeper into comments made on threads discussing it.

Here's a full copy of Will Aldrich's full response;

Michael,

Thanks for all your feedback, both in this blog post and in your TripIt helpdesk tickets. We appreciate the effort you've put into sending us detailed explanations of how you're using TripIt and the problems you've encountered. This kind of feedback is incredibly important to our team and we don't take it for granted. Many features we've built into TripIt have been inspired by exactly this kind of feedback.

I'd like to address the points you raise in the post.

1) I'll start with your point that "Removing features degrades experience" in which you take issue with the way we've changed the ability to edit weather locations. You point out that TripIt often guesses wrong about what location you'll be in, and then shows you the wrong weather (i.e. Perth vs. Singapore). You also note that fixing location by changing "weather location" has been removed and there's no timeframe for when it'll be back. Here's why. We've been evaluating a pretty big change to our architecture that would make TripIt faster. It would require a change in how we handle locations and weather. Since most folks don't use the "change your location by editing your weather" feature today we've been suppressing it on a trial basis. I'm sorry you've been inconvenienced by it. Bottom line, we can (and will) do better at guessing the location of your plans over time, which will obviate the need for using this clunky workaround in the first place.

2) Singapore Airlines confirmations don't work, even though the airline is on TripIt's list of supported sites
We know there are problems with Singapore Airlines' PDFs, and we mentioned this in our response in the ticket you filed with us. We do support other confirmation formats from Singapore. In your post, you take our helpdesk staff to task for closing your ticket without resolving it. I looked into the issue and it seems that our rep Ruth had asked you to check something on the Singapore site. After we didn't hear back for 28 days, our system automatically closed the ticket. We'd be happy to keep working the issue with you if you like. I'm going to look at our policy of auto-closing tickets after 28 days of inactivity. I can't promise we're going to change this (it's been working ok for almost a year) but we are already discussing it internally.

NB: This is incorrect, there was no request for further information after their first response. A copy of the booking, in three different formats supplied by SQ were supplied to TripIt via their support system. They did not investigate the issue further.

3) Time zone issues are challenging. Yes, RFC2445 has been around since November 1998, but most major PIMs (Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar, etc.) have only added iCalendar feed support in the last five to seven years and they handle time zone rules differently. As you might expect, big vendors change their implementations from one release to another, which making things even murkier. For example, Outlook supports floating time zones. Google Calendar initially did too, but then stopped supporting them in April 2009 without warning. iCal 3 for Mac works great with TripIt's calendar feeds. iCal 4 does not. In this environment, developers like TripIt (and the travelers who rely on us) have to choose between unappealing alternatives. We've been taking a wait-and-see approach on changing our iCal feed format since making a change prematurely could cause chaos for a lot of people.

As to your point about TripIt having crazy dropdowns for picking a time zone for a reservation, I agree! We've got some work to do. We're actively working now to refine all our data entry forms (a big effort that goes way beyond time zone selection) so hopefully there'll be improvement on this front soon. Will there be a shorter dropdown? Not immediately. But the improvements we're building now will save a lot of headaches for all our users right off the bat. Once implemented, they'll make it easier for us to consider fancier things like guessing what time zone your plan should be in, based on its location.

4) Maintain user defaults: Expand/collapse doesn't persist from one pageview to the next. You've pointed out a shortcoming of our service that annoys me and many of us at TripIt. We haven't chosen to address it yet because we've got a long priority list and it hasn't risen to the top yet. We'll get to it, but I don't know when.

5) "Why do you bombard me with advertising?"
Advertising is an important part of TripIt's business. We're passionate about the mission we're on to improve the travel experience over the long term, and we must generate revenue in order to sustain our efforts. That said, we are constantly working to deliver a great user experience that world-class travel brands can also participate in. If you're a Pro user, you see ads on the Web and in some emails (fewer ads than free users do), but you don't see any ads in our iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry apps.

I hope this helps clarify where we stand on the issues you raised. I'm happy to talk further. Meanwhile, let us know if you want to delve further into your Singapore Airlines issue. I'm grateful for your feedback, and appreciate your patronage as a TripIt Pro subscriber. We're working hard to continually improve TripIt, and your feedback inspires us to do better.

Will Aldrich
VP Product

[markis10]

Worldmate Gold is on special for $1.19 at present if anyone is interested.

[straitman]

Worldmate Gold is on special for $1.19 at present if anyone is interested.

For $1.19 I will try it.

[Bundy Bear]

I have found tripit very useful; especially good when you book 1 trip but use 5 different airlines and have 3 different hotel bookings on 5 day trip.

One part I find annoying at the moment, is that the iphone version keeps trips past.

Not sure how I am meant to get rid of them.

I use the free version; I think the paid version might be useful if I was going to the US but then its only useful if you have data on the phone as the updates won't come in unless I am connected to the net.