TripIt FAIL
I am a big fan of TripIt.com and their latest iPhone application, but I was recently disappointed with my TripIt experience during what I consider my key customer moments.
Key Moment #1: 24 hours before flight
TripIt FAIL, Friday 4/17
On Friday night, the day before my trip to Japan, I tried to view my TripIt itinerary on the iPhone and saw an empty itinerary with a vague error message . I tried to sign out and back in again, but without success. What was wrong? I had thought that a printed itinerary would be unnecessary since I had a beautiful TripIt itinerary on my iPhone… but it wasn’t working and I didn’t know why.
I then resigned to print out an itinerary from TripIt.com. Ah ha! TripIt.com was down for site maintenance! What inconvenient timing! I couldn’t print out an itinerary either. I had moved all of my itineraries and confirmation numbers to TripIt, but now 24 hours from my trip, I couldn’t access them. When would I be able to? It would have been nice to see an ETA.
I searched through my gmail and yahoo mail for my flight confirmation emails and my hotel confirmation and jotted things down on a piece of paper…
Key Moment #2: Day of flight
TripIt OK, Saturday 4/17
On Saturday morning, I checked TripIt.com again and discovered that everything was back up again. Good. The iPhone app was working again as well. I printed the itinerary (just to be safe), and threw away the hand-written piece of paper from the previous night… Japan, here I come!
Key Moment #3: On the plane
TripIt iPhone FAIL, Saturday 4/17
There isn’t much under-the-seat storage, so I put my backpack up in the overhead storage, along with my printed TripIt itinerary. I had a window seat with another passenger next to me - a big guy.
An hour into the flight, the flight attendant brings by the customs cards. Hmm – my paper itinerary is in my backpack overhead. Ah, but my iPhone is in my pocket (in Airplane mode of course)! I should be able to just use TripIt to look it up – even in Airplane mode – just like other apps (Notes, Todo, etc). Sadly, the itinerary was empty. I would end up having to ask the big guy to step aside so that I could retrieve my paper itinerary. There’s no reason why the TripIt iPhone app couldn’t store the itinerary on my phone.
Key Moment #4: In Japan (Abroad without Coverge)
TripIt iPhone FAIL, Sunday 4/18
See above. A cached itinerary would be helpful.
Some Improvements for TripIt:
1. The iPhone App should cache my itineraries on the phone so that it is accessible even when I have no connectivity (Airplane mode or Japan) and even when the site is undergoing maintenance.
2. The iPhone App needs a better error message if the site is going down for maintenance. Also, please provide an ETA for when service should be back up.
UPDATED 4/20/09 at 7:41 PM: Thanks to Will and Scott from TripIt for reaching out to me and letting me know about a pending new version of the iPhone client - I look forward to abadoning paper itineraries. Also, the maintenance was only for 20 minutes. It would still be helpful for those people that hit the service during scheduled maintenance to have some sort of estimated downtime. Still a TripIt fan!
