Just in time to help out with those holiday travel plans, both Yapta and Tripit, two sites that offer a variety of ways the find the best deals and manage your itinerary, have both announced new features.
Yapta adds a Firefox plugin to its stable of tools, which joins the existing IE plugin and offers the same functionality — tracking flight prices and keeping an eye on your purchases. You can grab the new plugin from the Mozilla Add-ons site, and for more details on what Yapta can do, check out our earlier coverage.
One thing to keep in mind with Yapta is that some airlines will charge a fee for “processing” any potential refunds Yapta mind find for you. The amount varies somewhat, from the ridiculous, blatant rip-off fee of $100 to, in some cases, nothing. Depending on the amount of refund you might be eligible for, it may be worth it or it may not. Either way you're unlikely to find out about price drops without Yapta.
Tripit, which we looked a briefly during the Web 2.0 summit, is a travel organizer to help DIYers manage their plans. Forward your confirmation info and Tripit will create itineraries and even include information like weather, maps, directions, reviews and more.
Until today's announcement some aspects of TripIt required a bit of manual work on your part, but no more — TripIt now syncs itineraries with any personal calendar that supports the iCal format. Just e-mail your confirmation data to TripIt and you can then feed all the TripIt data straight into Google Calendar, Outlook, Apple iCal, or any other service that uses the iCal format.
TripIt also now supports confirmation e-mail from a number of new (mainly international) airlines.
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