A recent Joel Spolsky blog posting alerted me to the intriguing features of TripIt.com, a travel-management site that I had heard of, but never used before. By coincidence, I had just finished making plane, hotel, and auto-rental reservations for a trip in March, so I had just received the basic documents that TripIt requires to work its magic: confirmation emails from American Airlines, Hilton Hotels, and Hertz RentaCar, with all of the details of the individual transactions.

Normally, I save these emails in my email archives, just in case I need to produce them as proof that I really did make the reservation (Hilton is positively archaic in this regard, requiring me to bring a printed copy of the confirmation that I’m using frequent-guest points to get a free room). And I typically use standard cut-and-paste mechanisms to lift the appropriate details out of those email messages, and paste them into my calendar program. Every business traveler has been through this routine; it’s just one of the tedious busywork aspects of today’s self-service travel-planning procedures.

But as Joel noted, all you need to do to forward those same email confirmations to “plans@tripit.com”, and it automatically receives them, collects them together, and produces an integrated travel itinerary with all sorts of additional information (weather, links to various related sites, etc.). Not only is it free, but it doesn’t require registering, setting up an account, logging in, or anything else.

Not believing that anything could actually be that easy, I found the three email confirmation messages for the reservations I made this evening, and forwarded them as instructed. Bang bang bang: amazingly, I got an email message back from tripit.com in no more than a minute or two; lo and behold, it really did lay out all of the details of my trip, with all of the details (confirmation numbers, dates, times, flight numbers, and more) neatly organized in a colorful, graphics-rich form. So, being a good sport, I have now created a registered-user account, and I do now have a user-name and password … but if I was feeling lazy or cranky or ornery, I wouldn’t have needed to do so.

As Joel also noted in his blog, one of the most delightful features of this service is that the user interface doesn’t require anything of the user, if the information is already available — it’s as if the user said to the TripIt system, “Do it yourself!”

I suspect this was probably a bit of a nuisance for the Tripit geeks to program, but it’s not rocket science: they know that they’re dealing with text-based messages from some known sources — e.g., one of a hundred different airlines, one of a dozen different car-rental services, one of a hundred major hotel chains, etc. They can figure out the format themselves if the respective airlines and hotels don’t provide it in a cooperative fashion. And they don’t need to get registration data from me — they have my name and email address from the email messages I’ve forwarded to them.

Perhaps the reason I’m so impressed by all of this is the attitude it expresses to the end-user: we don’t want to annoy you and waste your time by asking for information that we can figure out for ourselves. It’s just the opposite of every call that I make to the customer-service department of my bank, credit-card company, phone company, and other major technology provider: after being instructed to key in my account number, date of birth, Social Security number and random other details on my touch-tone phone, I’m eventually connected to a bored, surly human being who asks for the same damn information all over again! And every time I ask them, in utter frustration, why they insist on this double-entry, I get stonewalled.

When I first experienced this idiocy ten or twenty years ago, I assumed that it was the result of incompetent or buggy software systems; but now I think it’s deliberate. Maybe somebody can conjure up a rational explanation — e.g., from a security perspective — of why it’s important to collect the same information twice, in two different ways. But I’ll bet that 99% of the marketplace thinks that it’s the bank’s way, or the credit-card company’s way, to say “F**k you, Mr. User! We’re gonna drive you nuts, just to show you who’s in charge here!”

Well, TripIt show us that it’s not technologically necessary to operate in such a primitive manner; and they’re letting us enjoy the delightful experience of having the computer system automatically figure out the details, rather than deliberately annoying their users. I hope the idea spreads … and I hope that every company that refuses to incorporate Do It Yourself user interfaces in the next couple of years dies a slow, painful death.