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web Musings of The Global Traveller

Thursday, October 26, 2006

Travel planning

Thanks to the Geeky Traveller I now have another tool for planning future trips. It's called TripTie. It is based on the idea that it is easy planning when you have an example of a trip someone else did - I can vouch for that! From a quick play it seems to be easy to use, although I do have some concerns about security of private data (you can enter in reservation details and private notes etc although these are not viewable by others).

It looks like a good online replacement for various notes and files I leave myself in my email. I haven't yet checked out how shareable the info is - it may be useful allowing others travelling with you or left behind to have access to your full details.

It has only been up a few days and already has 300 trips loaded. So may not take long to get enough mass to be truly useful. User added tags should assist searches.

At the moment the site focuses mainly on the land component of travel. I wonder if this will change over time?

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Global Traveller, thanks for checking out TripTie! Privacy and user security were some of my primary concerns when building TripTie. While I want to encourage people to share trip plans, I don't want anyone using the information to stalk some one else. The way we've solved this is in three ways:

1. If you have something scheduled that you don't want anyone else to see (or just something that would only interest you), you can mark it private. It won't be viewable to anyone else besides you.

2. If you don't want your identity shown on your plan, you can hide it.

3. Most importantly and no matter what, people can see what you are doing on your trips but they can never know exactly when you are actually doing them. The only information that might be public is possibly what month and year you are going (seeing how old the trip is, and what season).

I hope this addresses some of your concerns :)

What do you have in mind in terms of travel not by land? A trip plan on the ocean perhaps or something like that?

The Global Traveller said...

Thanks for the very quick response. I wish you well with your site.

To clarify, the site seems to work best with information about the destination, rather than the journey getting there. For most travellers this would be exactly what they want. For some, eg those wanting to maximise frequent flyer mileage or squeeze the best airfare, other sites (such as www.flyertalk.com) may better cover the journey aspect.

Unknown said...

Thanks for clarifying, I understand what you mean now and I noticed FlyerTalk on your sidebar before. For maximizing Frequent Flyer Points, and for the ins-n-outs of Frequent Flyer programs, at this point TripTie will gladly bow to FlyerTalk. That community (the members) is just too awesome for that kind of information (I'm also a fan!). In fact, on our resources page, we link over to FlyerTalk and FrequentFlier.com.