Over the last few months I've been traveling a bit and I've started using website that aim at making the process easier. I've dent a few things already when I started using tripit a few months back, in the last month and a half I've been traveling quite a bit, to Thailand, Finland and Canada. I've invited my linkedin contacts to join tripit as I like the idea of sharing my work related trip with present and past co-worker. The other point that made me invite was the fabulous feature of plans@tripit.com.
This feature is the feature that will make me continue to use tripit.com. For every trip I book, I usually end-up having an email confirmation in my mailbox. If I forward this email - it's most likely going to be processed by tripit. Trip it will then create a "trip" with the dates and then write down a summary with flight numbers, hotel reservations, and phone numbers. So before boarding I can print that and have everything on one sheet of paper. I could also synch that information to my iphone (bat as I don't own an iphone, for the moment I don't). I can also export all that data to a calendar - that I can then synch to my nokia phone. You can also see where you friends are going, make sure your trips are not shared. For each destination, you'll get the wikipedia page with the best images from flickr tagged with the name of the place you are going to visit. And if you wish to figure out what is going on tripit propose a few upcoming event from the eventful website - so if you feel like attending a Jazz concert while staying on the other side of the planet, you might find where to go.
I had been using dopplr before I used tripit. My network on dopplr is smaller than on tripit, but overall dopplr offer way more features that I use and will use than tripit, and I can easily get the benefits of tripit ported to dopplr.
The first thing I get from dopplr is the ability to import calendars. The first thing I've set up is a bridge between tripit and dopplr - this let's me use the plans@tripit feature and get the trip imported and showing on dopplr. This feature also let's me import events I've subscribed to on the upcoming.yahoo.com website. So with dopplr I can aggregate some of the calendars that are exported from other websites I use. Of course it would be simpler If I could use plans@dopplr.com.
One other thing I like about dopplr is that I can use my OpenID to authenticate on the website - I don not need to give more credential and more personal information to use the website.
Besides calendar integration, the other feature that I love about dopplr, is that dopplr let's me add and publish content. I can easily add , restaurants, hotels and place to visit for any destination dopplr knows about. For some of these destination, it seems that dopplr has partnered with lonely planet and has imported some places and tips and trick from that website. One other benefits of having places is that for every place know by dopplr you can find a specific tag. That tag can be used to tag pictures for instance - and on flickr , this will add a little badge on the picture page. So people seeing your picture will be able to figure out details about it (These can be phone number, url for a website - reviews). I also like the fact That I can easily add a mini-review for a restaurant for instance. One thing I dislike in the current version of the website is that places are paginated : say that for instance you are looking at the City of Vancouver , British Columbia and looking at restaurants, if there are three pages of restaurant you need to go thru the three pages (maybe, if you are unlucky) to find it if it's on the website, it would be nice if these places (restaurants, hotels, sites to see) would be searchable from within the place I'm looking at.
Dopplr is also present on the iphone and integrates with both linkedin and Xing (tripit does linkedin only.). The social features in dopplr are richers as I can see who in my network visited the place I'm looking at - I then can fire them an email to figures a few things out. When I'm preparing a trip I use dopplr to see where to stay and eat, read reviews, ask questions - use their flickr integration to figure out what's to see and how other fellow photographer took the pictures.
As to dealing with trip details I use tripit make sure that the trip is exported in a calendar so I get it on dopplr. If I feel like attending a concert or anything else in that vein I'll have a look at both tripit and upcoming.