Planes, Trains and Automobiles: These Websites Tell You Where To Go

The web is a wonderful thing, not least for travelers. I've been on the road a lot the past few months, and I've found several relatively new websites that have helped smooth the road. One summarizes travel itineraries, one makes sense of the mysterious taxi fares in foreign cities, and the third helps you get around by bus.

If you find it hard to keep track of your travel plans -- especially those pesky confirmation codes, which are so useful and always drive me nuts -- you'll like TripIt (www.tripit.com), which aggregates your airline, hotel and car rental confirmations onto an easy-to-read series of pages.

For flights, hotels and cars booked through major travel agency and travel provider sites, you forward the emails to plans@tripit.com and they'll fall magically into a professional-looking trip itinerary. In my experience, it worked fine with confirmations from Delta and US Airways, but failed with confirmations from Best Western, a Las Vegas Strip hotel, and a corporate travel agent. Those had to be punched in by hand.

Once the basic details are in, you can add other information types like restaurant reservations, train trips or theater tickets. TripIt then automatically generates maps, driving directions, and weather reports for the locations on your trip, as well as giving you links to a completely useless mush of Wikipedia information it calls a 'travel guide.' The weather reports are useful; the maps are relatively generic -- and thus unhelpful --Google Maps.

The end product of TripIt's work is a slick, professional-looking itinerary that definitely beats the stuff I've hacked together in Microsoft Word before trips in the past. It even automatically syncs over to Google Calendar, iCal and Outlook on the Web or your PC.

TripIt isn't a travel agent. If your flight schedule changes, for instance, you have to forward TripIt the schedule change email yourself. And the site strikes one major false note. Trying to jump on some Facebook/TripAdvisor bandwagon, it persistently pesters you to invite all your friends to come online and share their travel plans with you. When I did that, my friends sent me nasty messages back questioning my motives.

The social aspect of TripIt does have one place, though. If you're running a small business where you've been managing all your travel on scraps of paper and through e-mail boxes, this lets co-workers know when and where to expect each other during trade shows and other events where several people are traveling to the same place. It could be a big help for travel managers for small businesses, too.

Get Off The Plane, Get On A Bus

Everyone knows that Google has great maps, and offers driving directions on the Web. But far fewer people know about Google Transit (www.google.com/transit), Google's slick interface for directions on public transit systems. For now, Google Transit has a very odd collection of systems. You can use it to get around Seattle, Austin, Dallas, San Diego, Portland Oregon, Tampa, Pittsburgh, Silicon Valley, a bunch of smaller cities, and the entire nation of Switzerland, for instance. Think of it as a companion to, not a replacement for Hopstop (www.hopstop.com), the big-city transit-directions website.

Some of Google Transit's regions don't work very well. Montreal, Detroit and Las Vegas have multiple transit agencies, and Google covers only one, producing incomplete or inaccurate directions for many trips. And while they say they cover Japan, you have to type everything in Japanese.

But when Google Transit works, it looks great and has some excellent, usable touches. I used Google Transit to plan some trips around Silicon Valley. Where most transit planning sites make you click on multiple links to get maps for each step of your trip -- an annoying, piecemeal approach -- Google put my walk to the bus, bus rides, transfers and the walk at the end on one map with each action clearly highlighted. The directions were accurate, too; I got from Sunnyvale to Mountain View and from San Jose to Cupertino on time.

No Bus? Take a Cab

Sometimes you just want to hop in a cab, though. I hate riding in taxis because I can never quite figure out how much the trip will cost beforehand. So I was thrilled when, on a recent trip to Barcelona, I discovered World Taximeter (www.worldtaximeter.com), which estimates taxi fares for any trip in Barcelona, London, Madrid, New York, Prague, Rome or San Francisco. Yes, it's an odd bunch of cities; the site was programmed by two Spanish guys as a labor of love.

The taximeter site lets you input two addresses (or landmarks) and gives you a surprisingly accurate fare, including all of those weird supplements for luggage, airport access, and estimated waiting time. It came within one euro of my two fares in Barcelona and ran a little high for a sample trip from the airport in New York. If you want to check fares while standing in line, you can send your mobile phone's browser to www.worldtaximeter.com/m.

Have you found a great travel utility on the Web? Tell us on our Cameras, Phones & Gadgets Message Boards today.