Travel Planning With GoPlanit
GoPlanit offers instant trip planning. Just type in your destination and you get a selection of activities, dining, lodging and flight options that you can choose from and add to your itinerary. It’s a great way to get a snapshot of what’s available in a particular area, though some areas are better represented than others. For example, I plugged in Hollywood, Florida as a destination and got a handful of activity suggestions, a couple of dining options and not much else.
Creating An Itinerary
Create an itinerary for a major city (San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Las Vegas, Seattle, Boston, Atlanta or San Diego) and GoPlanit really comes into its own. Start by putting in the start and end dates for your trip, hit the Plan It button and you get an instant itinerary with a range of well spaced activities for each day. You can fill in the gaps if you wish with other activities you want to do.
Other Features
Other features on the GoPlanit site include its ‘cut through the noise’ filtering system to customize suggestions based on your preferences as well as options for accessing your itinerary from a mobile device, sharing it with friends and blogging about your trip. You can also rate accommodations, restaurants, attractions and more using the Quick Rate tool. You can export calendars, get directions and choose how you share your travel plans.
Practical Planning
On the practical side, you can make hotel and restaurant reservations from the site. There’s also a built in search, linked to Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity, making GoPlanit a great place to compare prices for flights, accommodation (the choices include Hotels.com) and car rentals.
The only failing of GoPlanit is that there is only limited information for many of the destinations. At the moment, it works best for a large, well documented city. If you are going somewhere less well known, then you might have to fill in a lot of information from other sources. Despite that, GoPlanit works because it is easy – what could be simpler than planning a trip with a single click?
Tags: travel, travel planning, Travel Tips, Travel Tools
