Orlando Vacation of 2011 - Entry 1

I had a discussion yesterday with Doug Brashear (NavigationArts) and Barney Kirby (Marriott) when detailing how there's missed opportunity in efficiently and unobtrusively leveraging the traveler's mobile devices. One of the ideas to see if there's any usage pattern based on guest type and travel purpose was to start logging our own travels. With that suggestion this is my finally making use of this dusty blog of mine. Starting tomorrow, the 10th of August, I'm officially on PTO and will be heading to Orlando, Florida. My cousin, Rosalie, and her two daughters will be meeting me there. They'll be flying in from France and landing slightly past midnight. I haven't seen them in a while and the oldest daughter, Poeme, is my god daughter. So anyway, I've been making all my reservations with my gmail account. For this trip I created a TripIt account and started to learn how to use it. As I've been making the reservations TripIt has automatically been getting imports from my gmail account. It also scans through your email for confirmations and reservations to automatically add as well. I should note that you have to allow the automatic importing feature. Now, this automatic importing isn't 100% accurate. My TripIt account pulled in Rosalie's flight information, which is fine, but it did not pull in my Residence Inn hotel reservation, my Blue Man group confirmation, nor my La Nouba confirmation. Interestingly enough when I forwarded my Residence Inn hotel reservation to plans@tripit.com my account consumed that information without error. Go figure. The Blue Man confirmation and La Nouba confirmation confused my TripIt account so I had to manually enter in that information. Now that's no biggie on the PC but a definite pain in the ass on a mobile device; I'm currently sporting an HTC Incredible. TripIt provides a mobile app so I've downloaded that but have also printed out all my confirmation emails. Having never used TripIt, my fall back is still hard copies. An interesting note is that while I'm taking my work laptop with me on this trip, I stowed it into my carry-on backpack around 8pm this evening. Unlike most people, I'm not wanting for a PC as I have 2 desktops and a Macbook that I used to check email as well as enter in the plan information into TripIt. I wonder what other users that may or may not have extra laptops or desktops do. Do they wait until the last minute to pack away their machine? A benefit of having a Droid is that it comes with Google Maps and navigation. Even though I'm packing a GPS navigation with me, I'm taking my car charger for my Incredible just in case I need to use it as back-up GPS navigation. One final disgusting note, I'm packing 2 iPods (1st gen Touch and my Nano watch) for the long drive back from Orlando to Atlanta, GA and then from Atlanta, GA to Clarksburg, MD. Until next time. - Thai