For those of you who still enter trip itineraries into Excel spreadsheets (i.e. Emily's parents), IT has a new tool for you to try: Yahoo! Trip Planner. Emily has entered her recent road trip into the web-based application and she's confident to report that "Trip Planner is really cool and easy to use." She writes:
It's simple to get started, especially if you already use Yahoo! mail or Flickr. Click on 'Create a Trip,' then enter your login and password—if you haven't used Yahoo! before, follow the new user process. Once you're signed in, the actual trip-creation is pretty intuitive.
Trip Planner can be used before, during, and/or after your trip. Before you go, you can plan your trip by entering your itinerary in the 'Schedule View.' Here you can keep a list of every hotel, shop, and attraction you plan to visit (organized by date) and record vital information about each place, like the Zagat service rating for a specific restaurant. This information can then be seen in 'Map View,' which plots your itinerary on a Yahoo! map. During your trip, or after (as I did), you may add entries to the 'Trip Journal' (a blog), and illustrate your journal with photos you've uploaded into Flickr. Each trip gets its own URL, so you can distribute the link and share your trip with friends and family. The best part? The printable version allows you to organize your itinerary the way you like (by location, schedule, or category) and prints a thumbnail-size map next to each item, so you can easily find places along your route.
There are several problems I've run into, like finding my trip through the Yahoo! search engine and getting RSS feeds sent to my Yahoo 360 page, but the Trip Planner Bugs message board was helpful and easy to use."
Check out Emily's itinerary to see Trip Planner in action.
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