Taking off Travel blog

Sometimes you take a business trip and get back home, only to find that an old friend or colleague was in the same city at the same time. Think of the wasted opportunities to get together and have a bit of fun after a day of meetings. One way to avoid that happening is to use Dopplr. This site provides a simple way to keep track of your travel plans and share them with others whom you trust.

Getting Started With Dopplr

Like many sites, it’s got a social aspect, so you can use your email address book to find friends and business contacts who might already be on the site or be interested in signing up. When you have a network of contacts you can choose who can see your trips and whose trips you see. When your contacts add new contacts, you can see whether you know them too by exploring the ‘others you might know’ or ‘new on Doppler’ tabs.

Once that’s done, you can get to the important stuff - adding a trip. This is simple. All you do is use zip codes, airport codes or place names and the site will try to figure out where you are going. Add a start and end date for your trip and, if you wish, a note about the trip.

Who’s Going Where?

When you have some trips and some contacts, your home page when you sign in will show where you are going next, will list your trips and will allow you to see upcoming trips for your fellow travelers. You will be able to see at a glance which of your friends and colleagues will be in the same city as you at the same time - great for planning your down time.

There’s also a journal page which lists all your activity on the site - and that of your friends. It’s like a list of status updates (to borrow a term from other social networking sites).

One potentially useful feature is the city information. Just click on a city name to see trips to the city, which of your contacts live in the city, as well as tips for the city. Tips are contributed by Dopplr users and other users can say if the tips are useful.

The Verdict

My feeling about this site is that it’s great for business travel, but may be useful for others as well. It only does a couple of things, but it does them well. Not only does it give you an easy way to link up with others going to the same places, but it’s a quick reference for your travel plans. However, if you want a more detailed itinerary and even more useful features, then Tripit might be a better bet.

Tags: business travel, dopplr, travel, trip planning

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 13th, 2008 at 4:46 am and is filed under Travel Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.