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Talking Tech at TripIt's San Francisco HQ (Plus a Little Ping Pong)

If you open up your Foursquare app in San Francisco's Mission district, a slew of tech start-up HQs pop up all around. One of them is a name you may also be familiar with as another app on your phone or iPad: TripIt. Begun in late 2006, TripIt has grown from a simple travel itinerary management tool to something that can easily replace many frequent flyers' thick leather journals, full of appointment notes, airplane seat numbers and jotted loyalty program info.

So, while walking through The Mission on a sunny May day, we stopped in to see what makes TripIt tick. The answer, as we discovered, is actually quite simple: TripIt's overarching desire is to use technology to make life easier, to simplify the "internet travel experience." For users, this comes through immediately. Sign up for a free TripIt account, then forward all your trip confirmation emails to TripIt and a nice itinerary is generated, complete with city maps and pertinent reservation details for everything from flights, hotels and rental cars to Airbnb stays, ferries and Megabus rides.

Personally, ever since upgrading to the $49 annual TripIt Pro (which tracks everything from our flight status to if we're eligible for a refund), the combination of TripIt plus mobile boarding passes means we haven't had to print and keep track of any travel documents for a while. It's a new sort of freedom we didn't think possible for someone traveling as often as we do.

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iPhone Travel Apps / Travel Websites / Videos / TripIt / → All Tags

However Did We Manage Before TripIt?

It's Friday and we feel like watching some videos. Don't worry—we aren't going to go all Rebecca Black on you, but we are going to share a video we thought was pretty great, not to mention educational.

For some time now, we've been using the free iPhone Travel App/website TripIt to keep all our crazy confirmation emails from every corner of the travel earth together. It's hard to explain the magic that creates a beautiful itinerary and then allows us to view it and all our needed details on our iPhone without the need of a WiFi network, but luckily the above video spells it out quite well.

If you're anything like us, you should strongly identify with at least the first 25 seconds. Just looking at the "travel" folder in our Gmail can give us heart palpitations from the unorganized mess it appears, so we just throw it all at TripIt and make them deal with it. And now we know, via this video, exactly how they do deal with it.

iPhone Apps / iPhone / TripIt / → All Tags

One iPhone Travel App To (Almost) Rule Them All

Back in the old days, before you kids got all these newfangled Robots and Compact Discs and Moving Pictures, traveling was a genuine challenge. You trekked to the airport for miles through the snow - uphill, mind you - wondering all the while if they would have an airplane that could take you somewhere close to where you wanted to go.

"Somewhere close," by the by, was good enough. You were going to get lost once you got there anyway. So no reason to be picky.

Now travelers have this iPhone thing, which is basically like cheating. There are applications that track flights, map out attractions, and manage everything in between. We know because every day we get inundated by dozens of "Top 5 iPhone Travel Apps" posts. The current Google count for that search: 3,310,000. By the way, have you seen our own Five Best iPhone Apps for Your Next Trip?

Instead of all that nonsense, how about just using a single travel app? Or, failing that, a single app and just one small friend so it doesn't get lonely?

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