Free TripIt Pro for a year!

Update: The contest ended. Congratulations to the winners and thanks for all the comments and for reading the blog!

Free give away of a few TripIt Pro Memberships valid for 12-months.

TripIt Pro

Travel tools can help make life easier by assisting in arranging and sharing travel plans or providing information quickly.

One such tool is TripIt Pro from Concur.

TripIt Pro helps you organize all your travel plans in one place.

In addition, TripIt Pro connects your frequent flier programs together and keeps you updated on all your flights including gate and connection updates.

In addition, Tripit allows you to share your travel plans with others on your team.

Benefits of TripIt Pro

TripIt Pro is available for around $50 per-year and it offers the following benefits:

1. Everything TripIt – Coordinate all your trips and keep everything organized
2. Alerts – Send real-time alerts for delays, cancellations, and gate changes
3. Alternate Flights – Finds you alternate flights with open seats, fast
4. Seat Tracker – Tells you when the seat you want becomes available
5. Point Tracker – Keeps track of reward-program points and miles in one spot
6. Flight Refunds – Notifies you when you’re eligible for a flight refund
7. Sharing – Lets you share itineraries with your inner circle automatically

I like getting the alerts from TripIt pro while I am traveling about changes to itineraries as well as the Point Tracker which helps organize multiple frequent traveler programs together in one place.

How It Works

TripIt Pro works be either automatically importing your travel bookings from your Gmail, Outlook or Yahoo account or you can send travel confirmations  to a special address.

Once the itinerary is in the system it organizes it and keeps you updated on details about the trip.

You can add people into your inner circle so that you can share your travel plans with them.

Let’s say you are organizing a family Reunion. You can invite the family members that you want to attend into a group for the trip. That way everyone can see the itinerary so they will be up to date with your travel details.

Alerts

TripIt Pro tracks your flights and sends updates to you over email.

For example, if you are traveling from New York to Orlando with a stop in Charlotte, the system will track both of your flights and alert you of delays. The system provides gate arrival information and it also tells you exactly how many minutes you have to connect to the other flight.

The tool also can help during trip delays or cancellations because it can suggest possible routes that you might be able to re-book on. The options shown by the system may not be available by your airline, but it will help you to quickly find other possible routes.

Point Tracker

The point tracker is useful because you can go in and add all of your frequent guest program accounts.

Some frequent guest programs are directly connected to TripIt Pro, while others require you to send your monthly award program statement via email.

Overall it is a decent tool for keeping the points together.

Flight Refunds

This is something that the system does where it looks at the price you paid for your airfare compared to the current price for the same itinerary. If the price goes lower, you are notified when you can make money by having your ticket re-issued to the lower price. The system takes into account the change fee when determining if you reservation is eligible.

So if you paid $500 for a flight and it later is available for $250, the system will let know you that you can save money by re-booking. Assuming that the change fee is $200 for the ticket, you could save $50 on this change.

If the same $500 ticket now prices at $350, the system will not tell you because the savings is less than the change fee.

It is a neat feature; however, I have never personally benefited from this feature.

Seat Tracker

This is a feature where you can select your desired flight and mark the seats you would prefer to have. The system will tell you if those seats become available.

I have not used this feature but have used a similar feature on Expert Flyer.

Mobile App

TripIt Pro offers a mobile app that can give you real-time information on your flights and let you manage your account from your phone.

Bottom Line

TripIt Pro is one of those tools that can help make travel easier for you. It is one of the tools that I use regularly.

Win a 12-month subscription to TripIt Pro!

You can win a 12-month subscription to TripIt Pro.

In order to enter, please leave a comment below explaining what your favorite travel tool is or your best travel tip.

I have a few passes to give our and I will select a winner at random from all the comments in this message.

Please leave your comments by Friday, July 29 at 12:00 PM Central Time

Thank you to TripIt Pro who gave me a few of the passes when I attended TBEX Conference at the Mall of America

Good luck!