Questions and Answers

I have recently booked many complex iternaries for 2016 and trying to keep an overview of everything in my calendar. Given how much the professionals on this blog travel, I wonder if you have ever shared how you keep track of your bookings with different airlines and hotel chains. Do you use one of these travel organizing apps or is all just in your mailbox and calendar? In the light of Lucky’s recent post about hacked accounts I am hesitating to trust such travel apps. How do you do it?

I live and die by my google calendar — nothing else has worked efficiently for me.

It takes more time to input, but TripIt makes me want to die, TripCase was worse, etc. So the manual solution works best for me.

most of the time, airline email confirmations are “read” by google and can be automatically entered into google calendar without needing me to do anything. The only issue for me is when i book travel for someone else but have the confirmation sent to me – that gets entered as well so i’ll have to delete it manually. Also, out of habit, i check all of whatever google automatically enters for me anyway, like time zones. i also like to enter airport info such as which terminal i’ll be at and public transportation options to/from the airport

Well, what is complex? 6 round the worlds within 3 months is complex. Paper diary is best backed up by outlook calendar. You could also try to enter all bookings into one airline calendar, if flying one alliance. Thread may just as well be called “how do I better organise myself”. You could try entering all flights by date, flight number, flight time and airline onto a spreadsheet then print a few copies.

[USER=1393]@AlexGBBAGold[/USER] the point of this forum is to help each other, not to be judgmental, sneer, and put down. If you can’t answer without doing those things, skip to the next question.

@Guarav. Let’s leave the readers to judge me by the quality of my responses and not my personal character. I’m more than happy to “help” and PM each member individually but then the others won’t benefit. This will surely save me having a stick from you. -:)

[USER=897]@Samoa[/USER] : I would recommend TripIt. It does work for me, but some friends of mine agree with [USER=7]@Tiffany[/USER] and prefer using another tool, so start with the basic free version.

Also… [USER=29]@David W[/USER] is correct… if you have Gmail and confirmations are sent there, Google will automatically put your reservations on your calendar. Works great for me as a back-up/confirmation.

Finally… [USER=1393]@AlexGBBAGold[/USER] , I agree with [USER=79]@Gaurav[/USER] . Reading several of your comments today gives me the impression that you are not a nice person. The quality and (in)accuracy of your responses mean nothing if you come across as a jerk. I can’t speak for everyone, but I personally would appreciate you toning down the arrogance.

[USER=897]@Samoa[/USER]–to answer your original question, I use Kayak to keep track of my travel related stuff although Google’s new Inbox has a much improved section to keep track of all your travel related emails in multiple trip specific bundles.

Kayak offers a free trip tracking service. It’s a little more work than tripit that automatically monitors your inbox for better or worse but I like that I can control what information gets fed into my trip tracking by only forwarding the correct emails. I’ve found it pretty good at tracking most travel related events and automatically including them in the trips page.

Thanks for all your replies. I am actually not unorganized but often ended up doing many manual edits when the “import to calendar” of some airlines creating some mess with different time zones, or did not even include the flight number. My last booking created 7 entries for the 7 flights but all having the same name of the first leg. Some airlines do it well, others don’t…