Traveling is a pain in the neck. Which completely explains why I just took a new job that will have me on the road 70% of the time. Seriously, I like going places, but with all the security measures turning airports into a much less fun version of a three-ring circus, I’ll take all the help I can get organizing and  keeping track of my travel arrangements. 

A new free service, TripChill, thinks it can help me out. TripChill is based around an online portal that stores your itinerary, and on the go it works with any phone with SMS or a mobile browser. From there, it offers a myriad of services to help you deal with everything that has to fall into place to make a trip successful and that tends to jerk you around unpredictably at the absolute worst times.

I took TripChill for a test drive last week during a business trip. Read on for a quick look!

To get started with TripChill, you have to create a free account at their site. They say it “just takes a minute” and it honestly does. One thing to realize about TripChill is that they’re in partnership with Hotels.com, so they bug you about booking rooms and rental cars. However, the easy way they manage your itinerary makes it worth it.

Most travel programs make you tediously enter all of your trip details into their software before they can do anything helpful for you. TripChill also has a manual entry method, but by far the easiest way to input an itinerary is to simply forward the confirmation email to TripChill. I used this feature several times and love it. The site lets you know it got the information and begins processing within seconds, then is done in about ten minutes. It works great and couldn’t be easier! Then, your itinerary can be synchronized with Outlook or Google Calendar so you don’t have to retype everything.

Once your itinerary is in, you can have TripChill notify you about changes like canceled flights (US only, so far). Notifications are customizable — I chose to hear about canceled or rescheduled flights through email up to the day before I leave, and cancellations, reschedulings, or delays via SMS the day of my trip. It’s worth noting this is true SMS, not the “text message” offered by some airlines that is really just a text email. Setting up status notifications through each individual airline is complicated, time-consuming, and annoying, but TripChill’s notifications are simpler and better anyway, and they’re a whole lot less work to get.

One extremely handy feature while you’re traveling is the incoming flight status notification. I got text messages before each segment telling me which gate I’m leaving from and the aircraft’s ETA so I’m not stuck relying on the airport’s “On time, if you consider 45 minutes late on time but we’re not going to tell you that” messages.

I didn’t get a chance to look at several of the things TripChill can do during my trip, such as finding alternate flights after a cancellation or locating a hotel room when bad weather shuts down travel. Frankly, I’m glad I didn’t have to! But those features are insurance, and it’s nice to know they are there.

Since this is just a quick look, I don’t have time to go into the rest of TripChill’s many features. However, with very little effort — we’re talking five minutes spent configuring and a few forwarded emails — I got extremely useful flight notifications which by themselves make TripChill worth looking into.

I missed a flight once because I went to the wrong gate, and I wish I’d had TripChill then because that would not have happened. Since it’s easy to use, handy, resource-efficient, and free, TripChill is one tip I’m glad I got.

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