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| How I use Trip Boss in my travels |
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by Michael Evans
Our company supports aircraft operations for U.S. and foreign
militaries. During the summer, Trip Boss got me to the Arctic Circle
(and back), in support of the Finnish Air Force.
Helping me get from Nashville, TN, to Rovaniemi, Finland, Trip Boss
kept me in the right city at the right time (eight flights and about 48
hours of traveling - round trip!).
Trip Boss is the first tool I reach for when planning my travel.
Traveling for a living since 1982, I've tried several Palm programs for
travel organization, Trip Boss is the easiest and has the most features.
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| How mtrvl.com helped me in my travels
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by Dov Nelkin
Mtrvl.com is an amazing site, which I have bookmarked on both my laptop
and my treo. It puts a well-thought out collection of mobile
formatted sites at your fingertips, in a fast-loading, uncluttered
webpage. Some of these sites were familiar to me, for example
weather underground, which was so good for Charlottesville that I used
to have it on my personal web page, and XE.com, the only place to go
for quick currency conversion. Others, including the earthcomber site,
were new to me when I started using Mtrvl.com. The links to all
the airline companies are really helpful, especially when a flight
you're supposed to be on is canceled or delayed. Not having to
search for different web sites can save critical time and sometimes
it's another carrier that carries the day!
The quick links all precede advertising, so you have immediate access
to information as soon as you open your browser. I have used it
even in my home area, to get weather and have found a new free wifi
location nearby with earthcomber ("find places close to your
location").
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How I use Trip Boss in my travels
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by
Michael Schmidt
 Trip Boss has a lot
of features, but you don't have to use every one on
each trip. I use Trip Boss for vacations, but recently found that
it's great for business trips, too. I recently set up a trip to
visit a supplier, who is working on part of an assembly line for us.
On my Treo, I set up my itinerary in Trip Boss, including noting
meetings and notes for the agenda. When I was at the airport, I could
check my flight status using the new feature that links to the major
airlines. Lucky for me, my plane was on time.
When I got to Minneapolis, I was able to pull up my confirmation number
for my car rental in TripBoss, when they had a bit of trouble locating
my reservation. I checked the weather for the area and found a link to
maps via Trip Boss' travel aide and mapped the route to my hotel.
After I checked in, I went down to the hotel's restaurant for
dinner. I noted my expenses for my meal, and entered all the
receipts I'd collected from the first leg of my trip. I checked
my meeting schedule in Trip Boss and called our supplier to confirm.
The next day, I took plenty of photos with my Treo for my trip report
upon my return. I used Trip Boss's journal feature to note
captions for the pictures and also to jot down my observations for
later. While on my tour of the supplier's shop, I looked at the
check list I'd set up in Trip Boss to ensure that I didn't miss
anything I wanted to review. (Did I mention I used TripBoss's checklist
to set up packing lists and a pre-trip prep list?)
My supplier took me out to dinner that night, but the next day I was on
my own for a little personal time. I used another feature in Trip
Boss's travel aide to find things to do and places to eat that were
near my location.
When I returned home, I exported all my expenses for my expense report
and then used the journal to put together the trip report for my boss.
Trip Boss and my Treo proved to be a valuable companion on my business
trip.
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How mtrvl.com helped me in my travels
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by
Frank Reyes
My recent travels in January 2007 to Montreal Canada, then,
unexpectantly, to Keene, New Hampshire to visit my mom (She was
hospitalized while I was on a business trip) utilized Mobile Travel
Aide. I has to change my return flight and date with American Airlines
from John Wayne, to Hartford Ct, then rent a car, and drive to Keene
NH, all while I was still in a meeting! I didn't have AA's phone
number, and their web site takes forever to load on my Treo, so I was
glad I had bookmarked mtrvl.com.
Using mtrvl and my Treo resulted in being able to change my flight,
after checking on alternative flights, and book a rental car. It really
provided me with the peace of mind knowing that I would not have to
worry about reservations. |
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Sample
Entry--winner from previous Trip Boss contest
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How
do you travel with
Trip Boss?
by Randy
Jones
I am a relatively new owner of a Treo 650 and am new to Trip Boss. I
recently downloaded it to give it a test drive on a business trip to
our Dallas office. What I’m going to list below will just give you an
idea of what I go through on a business trip in order to keeping track
of everything I need to in the name of my work!
I’ve used a myriad of programs to keep track of information during
different portions of my trips in the past. Prior to leaving on my trip
I would use DateBk5 to set an alarm for my flights and would include
flight information, gates, seating arrangements, and time all in the
entry in DateBk5. Most often I would use Bonsai to create a checklist
of items that I needed to remember to do from the time I left my house
until I arrived at my destination. Next I would use Documents to Go to
store spreadsheets that kept up with my expenses such as meals, hotels,
car rentals and fuel on the business trip so that I could easily
complete my expense report of items purchased on the trip. Finally I
would log my thoughts in DayNotz so that I could recount those items
that hit my brain while traveling. Some of my best stuff comes while
I’m traveling! As you can see I have a multitude of programs I use just
to keep up with everything I need to do on a business trip. That’s
where Trip Boss comes in. I decided to download this puppy and give it
a run to see what was under the hood. I must say I was pleasantly
surprised that I was able to do so much with the program, but while I
was able keep track of everything I needed to in one concise package I
felt that I hadn’t completely put Trip Boss through it paces. This
brings me to the REAL challenge I had in store for it, our family
vacation to Orlando-to Disney World!
We have been planning this vacation for over a year now. We decided it
was as good as time as any to take our two children (ages 4 and 10) to
Disney World. For the 10 year old, if we didn’t go soon he would reach
that point where it wasn’t “cool” anymore. As for our 4 year old, we
thought it would be the perfect age to see the magic in her eyes as she
experienced Disney World for the first time. We had been saving for
quite some time to insure that we had enough for everything that we
wanted to do. We had arranged flights, hotels, rental cars, etc., you
know the drill. With all of this going on I was beginning to feel out
of control. It was at this moment I decided to really see what Trip
Boss could do, at this point I was committed to see if I could manage
our entire vacation (information, schedules, expense tracking, you name
it!) from one program.
I began entering data for our trip into Trip Boss; I started with
logging our destination-Orlando, Florida and listed every piece of
information. Next I listed each leg of the trip in Trip Planning, I
figured I could use this to make sure I was getting proper credit for
the air miles I was logging (gotta make sure I get every mile I
supposed to! J). I then proceeded to input our itinerary for the trip
to make sure we were where we were supposed to be, when we were
supposed to be there.
This was the first time our children had flown and I wanted to enjoy
their excitement on this “maiden voyage”. I don’t know if many of you
have traveled with children before but it can be a harrowing experience
to say the least, especially if it’s the first time getting on a plane
for the kids. By getting all of this information input into one place
and only having to look in one place made traveling much easier and
allowed me to enjoy their excitement instead of worrying about the next
leg of the trip (i.e. where do we have to be, when?).
Once we arrived in Disney World the fun began (in more than one way)!
Although we were there for fun I had to remember that we had a limited
amount of funds that had to be managed so that we could do everything
we had planned to do and maybe a little bit more (if at all possible
J)! That’s where the Budget section of Trip Boss comes into play, while
I had already entered a lot of data in regards to the trip I now needed
to set up a budget so that I could track what we had budgeted and how
we were performing against that budget. I was very happy to have
something like this in Trip Boss that would allow me to track expenses
and see how that compared against our budget. I know there are programs
out there for your Palm that will allow you to budget and track, but
again, where can you get this all in one package? This made it very
simple to know exactly where we stood during the entire trip.
Finally some of the other features were also very useful. I managed to
keep a daily journal, albeit short entries, so that I could tie certain
events throughout the day back to photographs we were taking. It also
served to recount the trip later on as we were reminiscing. I also used
the rating portion of Trip Boss to maintain any comments I had that
could later be recalled so that I could share them with whomever.
Again, it was very helpful to have this consolidated in one place
whenever it was needed.
I really feel like Trip Boss was a huge help to me on this trip. I
helped me keep track of everything I needed in one place. It allowed me
to enjoy my trip with the family and not worry about what was happening
next since it was already there when and if I needed it. It allowed me
to not have to worry (at least too much) about finances since I had
already set up a budget and was able to track expenses against that
budget. All in all this vacation was a huge success, we really enjoyed
our time together, didn’t get overly stressed out about traveling,
managed to maintain our budget and still had a little money left over
at the end (and we did a lot of stuff!). It doesn’t get much better
than that!
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