Plan your business trip itinerary

If your job requires you to travel a lot, you’ll probably have experienced the many frustrations of life on the road – be they missed connections, forgotten reservations or changes to your schedule.

Whether you manage your own travel itinerary or have an assistant to do it for you, keeping track can be exhausting even when everything goes to plan. When it doesn’t, the stress inevitably dials up several notches for even the most seasoned business traveller.

Luckily there are apps available that can manage it all for you. TripIt, for example, will compile your entire travel itinerary in one place if you forward your confirmation emails to its platform. Your flight times, car hire details, restaurant bookings and hotel rooms will then appear on one handy timeline, which is accessbile offline if you’re not able to connect to the internet.

A premium subscription to the app, costing $49 per year, also provides real-time flight updates including check-in times and gate numbers, and can help you book seats or find alternative flights, for example.

If you’re the kind of person that likes to keep on top of your travel plans – or simply doesn’t have the luxury of depending on someone else to do it all for you – this app is an intuitive way of taking control.

Google Trips is an alternative which, although it is intended more for consumer travel, can be useful for business journeys too as it pulls in booking information from Gmail emails. It doesn’t require you to forward them but the options for manually editing details are quite limited and it doesn’t always populate the relevant information from your calendar or emails automatically, and there isn’t as much functionality as there is in TripIt.