Coordinating the logistics for a group trip can be a nightmare. Between coordinating travel dates, flights, hotels, and itineraries, you’ll probably end up losing days of productivity and sanity. It’s time to see if online travel management sites can help out.

There are lots of travel sites that can help you find hotels and flights, like Kayak. And then, there are travel social networking sites that let you read and write reviews about various travel destinations, like TripConnect, TravBuddy, and Epic Trip. However, none of these sites can really help you plan and manage the nitty-gritty details of your trip. There are two trip management sites that I’m aware of that can do this: Triporama and TripHub.

Triporama lets you manage the basic elements of your group trip. There are entry boxes to record traveling details such as arrival/departure information, accommodations, and activities. You can also manage who will be traveling with the group, and send out blanket emails with announcements.

This is all well and good, but the problem with Triporama is that the details of the trip must all be entered using simple text boxes. In essence, the interface is no different than using multiple text files to handle your trip planning. It would be nice to incorporate some information awareness by automatically pulling in flight data, or even simply pre-filling the text boxes with specific dates and locations. For free form data, it’s always best to implement some type of wiki. For example, the itinerary could be an all accessible wiki page that anyone can add their suggestions for things to do.

Triporama also provides trip ideas, which is basically a portal to travel sites that offer pre-paid vacation packages, many of whom Triporama is an affiliate with. In the end, Triporama is just too basic for any kind of complex travel management, and seems to be more of a front door to lure you into buying their affiliated vacation packages.

TripHub has more management features than Triporama. It has all the basic functionality: email lists, flight information, and hotel information. But, it does all this with a more sophisticated data entry interface, allowing you to fill in exact dates, number of guests, addresses, and much more. You may not think that this is a big deal, but when it comes to multiple people entering data, it’s best to constrain and guide their text inputs so that it will be easier to glean the relevant data later on.

TripHub also has search capabilities for flights and hotels, which is powered by Hotels.com. What’s nice is that TripHub can let you comment on hotels and let your whole group see what hotels are being considered. When it comes to emails and group polls, I’m always an advocate of only having the information entered once, rather than having to send out different emails and lists with the exact same information.

Overall, TripHub is a nicely executed site, and is suitable for anyone needing to manage a large group of travelers. For groups of 6 or less, it might be more of a hassle than a blessing to use TripHub. Most of the time, I find that using Gmail to track my conversations is enough for small groups.

If anyone else has a favorite travel management tool or technique, make your comment below. I would love to hear about it.

This entry was posted by James Yu on Tuesday, May 30th, 2006 at 4:19 pm and is filed under Travel, TripHub, Groups. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.