We recently took a tour of London and the Balkans (Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Istanbul). Five countries with five currencies and none on the Euro. Thank g*d for ATMs. And several different airlines (United, EasyJet, Croatian, JAT, Turkish, Luftansa) plus buses.

TripIt logoHow to manage all of that without email? First I admit I used my wife’s email as a backup. But the real win for reducing email and going to achieve #noemail is using TripIt.com and their great mailbox scanning feature.

I’ve used TripIt for years and found that it makes setting up and dealing with your itinerary almost painless.
In the past, you simply forwarded your email to TripIt and the invisible monkeys transformed all that information from the airlines, hotels, etc into your itinerary automagically. You can then edit and add the non-mail driven bits — in our case buses, home stay addresses, sites visits that we needed to schedule, etc.

Now you need not even forward the email. TripIt can and will with your permission scan your Gmail box and the monkeys get to work without you even asking them. Pow you have an itinerary without even reading mail.

And this serves as a good answer to the needling question: Isn’t someone reading your email for you? You can answer: If my email is related to my travels, it’s read and acted on by the invisible monkeys at TripIt.

While I’ve written only about email scanning, TripIt has many other great features including maps, directions, expense tracking, and automatic calendar integration. Explore, it’s worth your travel time.

Disclosure: I have no relationship with TripIt other than as a satisfied client. I have never met someone I know to be a TripIt employee or investor.