Travel planner tools

Planning for a trip can be very stressful, whether you're going for a weekend or a year. A good trip planner can help greatly and even better if it's online and accessible from anywhere. Luckily, a number of services are available, although each has distinct strengths and weaknesses.

Realtravel's Web 2.0 solution is fantastic to find out more about your destinations, while Yahoo! and TripHub help you get organized quickly. Try them out and pick the one that works best for you.

Realtravel My Trip

The Realtravel.com's Trip Planner lets you build up a comprehensive itinerary that combines other user's blog entries, photos and tips with your own notes. It helps you pick out the different parts of a trip, such as air connections, hostels and other accommodation and things to do at your destinations.

Still pretty new, but sure to improve rapidly.

TripHub

The TripHub travel planner is better for organizing yourself and you can put in detailed timings, flight itineraries, activities, contact numbers and much else.Users can coordinate all this in one place, greatly helping with the travel planning.

It’s the structured communication that makes TripHub a useful tool. Managing invitations, RSVPs, an easy blog for each trip, all of these are undoubtedly useful.

Yahoo! Travel

Trip Planner is a tool on Yahoo! Travel that lets you save hotels, attractions, restaurants, maps and more to a customized travel guide. You can add travel dates, your own comments, even bookmarks for other sites to your trip. Once you've created your trip, you can print a copy to bring with you, or access it from any computer with Internet access.

Summary

RealTravel’s My Trip Planner actually falls short of those existing tools in terms of pure organizational features. However, the depth of content available from other travelers gives RealTravel a different kind of advantage. And while RealTravel can create better planning tools over time, it will be hard for competitors to compete with RealTravel’s active traveling and content-creating community.

Your mileage will vary from any of these, so a test-run is in order. Overall, I believe RealTravel's solution will end up being the most usable for most travellers.

If you know of any other travel planner tools or sites, please leave a comment below or send an email.

- By Jack on 22 October, 2006 in Travel.