As a frequent traveler I depend on my iPhone to keep me up to date with my itineraries and flight information. While there are lots of Apps on the App Store to accomplish these tasks I look for the ones that simply have the best interfaces and provide the most information. Two apps that I depend on the most are TripIt and FlightTrack Pro. While I love both of these apps, I'm always looking for ONE app that will do the job of these two. TripDeck may be just the app I'm in search of.
What makes a great Travel App?
I define a great travel app as one that can give me all the information I need in a very intuitive and slick UI (user interface). Having the information I need in the app is meaningless if I can never find what I need when I need it. Unfortunately with hectic travel schedules sometimes a matter of minutes can make all the difference in the world when your flight is canceled and you need to rebook! A few seconds even can cost you the last available seat on the next flight. So I need an app that has it all and can alert (via push notifications) me when I need to make a change. FlightTrack Pro has been a fantastic travel companion and just last week the push notification that I received alerting me that my connecting flight had been canceled allowed me to rebook quickly before the first flight even took off. TripIt has been great in giving me my itinerary at a glance including the all important confirmation numbers, addresses and phone numbers for each location. While this dynamic duo works great, I wanted to see if I could do it all in one App and it looks like TripDeck may be just that App!
What does TripDeck do?
With TripDeck I can either enter itineraries manually or do a one time log in from the app to TripIt.com and have it bring in all of my existing itineraries. This way I don't have to do double entry.
The information for each portion of the itinerary is presented beautifully via "Trip Cards". Very well designed with a easy to read color scheme. I love the attention to detail here.
If you need to drill down further into any card just tap to flip it over and get more information. The type is a little small on the back of the Trip Card, but still readable. Also there's an icing on the cake kind of feature: Notes! The App lets you key in your own notes for any part of the trip. This is handy when you need to put in a few more details right on the spot.
Room for improvement
While I LOVE what TripDeck already does and I can see it easily replacing the TripIt app for me there are a couple of things that make me hesitant to delete FlightTrack Pro. First off FlightTrack Pro provides more information about the flight such as where the plane is at any given time via a map. Now this really isn't all that important for me when I'm actually the one flying, but it is nice to have when I'm tracking the inbound flights of friends and family. Also FlightTrack Pro provides weather information about the destination city, on-time performance forecasts, elapsed/remaining distance/time. It would be nice to have some of this in TripDeck. Lastly and probably the thing that bugs me the most is that TripDeck doesn't automatically update itself based on changes from TripIt.com. So if you make changes on TripIt.com you'd have to not only remember to update TripDeck, but the way you update it is to delete the itinerary and re-import it. For some reason this really seems odd since FlightTrack Pro (by the same developer) doesn't require this. It sees the changes on TripIt.com and updates automatically upon launch of the app.
So here's what I'd like to see: Mobiata makes GREAT apps like FlightTrack, FlightTrack Pro, TripDeck and HotelPal. How about making TripDeck the ultimate app that includes all of the features of the other apps? Call it TripDeck Pro and I'd gladly pay $20 for it. Maybe even more if it worked as good as all of the individual apps. I could even live without Hotel Pal, if TripDeck Pro was the combination of TripDeck and FlightTrack Pro.
The Bottom Line
TripDeck is BEAUTIFUL! It should be considered by any frequent traveler. While TripIt is free I'd pay for TripDeck just for the better user interface. TripDeck is definitely headed in the right direction and I'm happy with my purchase. I want more of the FlightTrack Pro features and automatic updating from TripIt.com before giving it that 5th star.
TripDeck
TripDeck lets you manage all of your travel itineraries via nice visual Trip Cards. It ties into TripIt.com and has push notifications for your flight status updates.
- Mobiata LLC
- Get on App Store
- $9.99
All info was collected on 15th February, 2010 when the app was reviewed.
About Terry White
Terry is the co-author of The Best Selling "The iPhone Book" 1st, 2nd and 3rd editions. He has been active in the industry for over 25 years and is the founder and president of MacGroup-Detroit, Inc., Michigan's largest Macintosh Users Group, host of the Adobe Creative Suite Podcast and a technology writer - Terry White Tech Blog.
Aside from the user interface, what is the difference between this app and the free TripIt app? What does TripDeck do that really improves on it?
Beside the UI, TripDeck allows in app editing of the itinerary and TripIt doesn’t.
One nice thing about Flight Track Prois that it is a universal binary, so works natively on both the iPhone and the iPad. The flight map looks gorgeous on the large iPad screen! Both Tripit and TripDeck are (currently) only iPhone apps, so they run on the iPad, but either iPhone-sized or doubled to HUGE size.
The iPad is the ideal travel device, though you may not always have the connectivity you do with an iPhone (i.e. A Wi-fi-only iPad or a 3G iPad but you’re not paying the monthly fee right now.) A universal TripDeck would be an incredible product. (Id feel a little guilty “throwing away” my Flightdeck Pro investment, but TripDeck can handle all kinds of transportation (plane, train, car, boat) so would be the better choice unless you were a plane-only kind of guy.