Develop and Share a Trip Itinerary

Develop and Share a Trip Itinerary

Yahoo! Trip Planner can help you organize an excursion and let you share your travel plans with others.

Type travel! into any Yahoo! Search form and you'll find yourself at Yahoo! Travel (http://travel.yahoo.com): a one-stop shop for planning vacations or business trips. You can find flights, hotels, and rental cars. You can read reviews from other Yahoo! users and look for special travel deals.

Yahoo! Travel includes a feature called Trip Planner (http://travel.yahoo.com/trip) that can help you create a personalized travel guide that you can access at any time or share with others. Imagine you find yourself in charge of organizing a group trip for students; you could enter your itinerary into the Trip Planner and share it with students, parents, and teachers. Instead of printing and distributing pages of information, you can add everything at Yahoo! and pass around a URL for the itinerary. Even a smaller group going on a family vacation could benefit from having hotel, restaurant, and sightseeing details in one place.

Create a Trip

To start a custom trip, browse to http://travel.yahoo.com/trip and click the "Create your first trip" link. You can add a name, description, and dates for the trip into the form, as shown in Figure.

Create New Trip form at Yahoo! Trip Planner

You'll need to choose how you want to share your trip. Each trip can be Public, Private, or for a list of specific Yahoo! IDs. As you're building the trip, you might want to leave this setting as Private. You can change the sharing settings for a trip at any point in the future.

Be aware that setting a trip as Public means anyone can view the details of the trip. If your trip includes notes with personally identifiable information and the dates you'll be traveling, you could be letting the world know when you won't be home!

Your new trip is a container that can hold all of your trip plans. You can add just about anything you find at Yahoo! Travel to a trip, such as restaurants, hotels, and tourist attractions. Keep an eye out for the "Save to Trip" link as you browse or search Yahoo! Travel, and click the link to add anything you find interesting to an existing trip. Figure shows a list of things to do around Newport, Oregon, and each listing includes the "Save to Trip" link.

The "Save to Trip" link on Yahoo! Travel search results

If you can't find a particular location or event in Yahoo! Travel, you can add it as a custom item to your itinerary. For example, a stop at a relative's house for tea isn't going to appear in Yahoo! Travel, but there's no reason you can't add it yourself.

To add a custom trip item, browse to the Trip Planner and click the title of your trip to view the trip page. On the right side of the trip page, you'll find a box labeled "Add Items to Your Trip." Click the "Add your own custom items" link, and you'll see a form like the one in Figure.

Select the trip the item should be included with and then choose a category for the item. You can choose from Entertainment, Hotel, Restaurant, Shopping, "Things to do," or Other. Once you've chosen a name for the item, you can include as few or as many details as you'd like, including URL, phone number, and address.

Yahoo! Travel also provides a bookmarklet for adding custom items to your trip. You can find the bookmarklet on the right side of your trip page. To install, drag the bookmarklet link to your bookmarks. Then, when you're browsing a site and would like to add it as an item to your trip, click the bookmarklet and the item name and the URL will be filled in for you.

Adding a custom item to an itinerary

Personalize the Trip

Once you have the hotels, restaurants, and any custom stops listed in your trip, you can take some time to personalize them by adding a schedule, categorizing the items, or adding custom notes.

To personalize the trip, browse to the trip page and review the items. Each item should have three links directly under the listing: "Edit notes," "Edit tags," and "Add dates." As you click any of these links, a window will pop up to let you add personal information. For example, click the "Add dates" link under a restaurant to choose the day of the trip you'll be visiting and whether it's for Breakfast, Brunch, Lunch, Dinner, or Other, as shown in Figure.

Click Update when you're finished, and the item will be scheduled. You can schedule other items in a similarly intuitive way. Hotels list the check-in and check-out dates, and attractions can be listed as Morning, Afternoon, All Day, or Other. You can't list precise times for each item in the itinerary, but then what trip ever goes exactly as planned?

If you want to add specific times to a particular item, you can add the times as part of a note. Notes are any arbitrary text you'd like to associate with an item. This can be anything from information that only you have about a particular location to warnings about a location that aren't included in the listing.

Assigning a date to a restaurant item

To add another layer of organization to the trip, you can give each item a set of arbitrary keywords called tags. For example, you might want to tag every item in a particular city with the name of that city. Or you might want to tag every activity planned for Friday with the word Friday. People viewing the itinerary can sort items by tag, so they can zoom in on one aspect of the trip.

You can also add custom map views to your trip. Browse to your trip page and click Map View at the top of the page. Adjust the map by zooming in or out and choosing attractions to list. Once you have a map view you'd like to share with the group, click the "Save this map" link above the map, as shown in Figure.

Once you add the map to your trip, it will be available to anyone viewing the trip. Plus, you can add notes and tags to the map to add detailed explanation or group the map with other items in your trip.

As you can see, the Yahoo! Travel Trip Planner provides a way for you to be your own travel agent and share detailed plans with others. Plus, each stop in the itinerary links to web sites with more information, giving your travel mates the ability to do their own research about areas they'll be visiting. And storing the travel plans on Yahoo! means the itinerary will be available anywhere there's an Internet connection.

Yahoo! Trip Map View with the "Save this map" link