I almost made a critical error when planning my upcoming vacation.  It all started with what I thought was a 12-hour layover in Tokyo.  I was researching what I wanted to do since sitting in the airport for 12 hours did not sound like fun to me and I’d never been there before.  After some thought I settled on something simple…I’d visit Disneyland.  I especially thought this was a great idea since the day before I have a 26-hour layover in Los Angeles.  Why not visit both on back-to-back days?…now that would be something interesting to write about on my travel blog.

When I was getting ready to make the final plans, I re-read my airline ticket and realized (or not…more later) that I actually had a 36-hour layover in Tokyo.  I thought “whew…at least I noticed it now”.  I did some research, booked a hotel, and I was ready to go.

Later I thought all of these reservations, layovers, hotel bookings, and everything else were getting a bit hard to manage.  I remembered using TripIt a few years back when having to make several bookings for one trip (albeit far fewer than I had to make for this current trip).  So, I went about forwarding all my reservations to TripIt.  They consolidated all of them into one “trip” and all of a sudden everything was less complicated.

Until I noticed my first issue…

For some reason in TripIt my hotel for Tokyo was showing up first on my itinerary.  Further investigation showed that instead of booking my hotel for December 8th, I had booked it for November 8th (before I even start my trip).  Turns out that was just the start of my issues.  I logged into Expedia to change the dates and there was no availability…oh no!  I had to cancel the reservation, but before re-booking I decided to read the rest of my TripIt itinerary.

Oops…error number two which ironically turned out to be a positive.

TripIt conveniently shows where you cross the International Date Line in an itinerary.  Yep…you guessed it…I cross the International Date Line on my way to Tokyo.  It turns out that my first assessment that my layover would only be 12 hours was correct.

I’m so thankful that using TripIt helped me figure out that not only did I book my hotel on the wrong day I actually didn’t need a hotel at all.  Instead of continuing with the free version of TripIt, I upgraded to a paid subscription.  I think it will be well worth it.

Have you ever used TripIt?  What did you think?

Have you ever made a booking mistake like this?  If not, maybe pretend you did and tell me about it so I don’t feel so stupid.  😉