I’ve recently discovered TripIt through LinkedIn, which has an app to link in TripIt travel plans.

I’ve got to say, it’s pretty awesome. Forward your confirmation emails to it, and it will automatically build them into travel plans. I normally get PDFs via American Express. But my trips are a multi-email jumbled mess of multiple cities, one-way airline tickets, hotel reservations, and whatnot. With every trip, I generally spend a tedious, hair-pulling amount of time gathering up all the scattered emails and manually creating a document that has all the information. Then I have to go track down things like driving directions, time to destinations, and weather so I know what to pack.

No more. TripIt is smart. It can take all those zillion confirmation emails and consolidate them into one unified trip plan, complete with weather, driving directions, and links to online check-in and flight status. It produces a full schedule of your day, although it has the key problem that it doesn’t know that you need to be at the airport at least an hour in advance of your flight.

Plus, TripIt has a social-networking element, similar to Dopplr, so you can privately share your trip information with others. (This helps my spouse, who has to ask questions like, “What city are you in now?”)

This is what useful applications should be — automating away tedium.