Click here to read my previous posting on Google Voice.

I did say in my previous article that it has changed my life, and it really has! I keep on thinking that it’s so good that there has to be a catch.  Well, there really isn’t, but the service is still in its early stages, and there are bound to be a few irritations and limitations.  Here are two that I have come across in the last week:

• Occasionally it can be really slow if you want to initiate a call from the website.  Not a big deal.
• I often use a conference calling from www.freeconference.com.  This is another service that I like.  Basically the deal is that you can run a full featured conference call, but, unlike a lot of these services, there isn’t a per-minute charge.  The difference is that it is a toll call.  It works really well.  You sign up.  They give you a telephone number, a participant code, and a moderator code, and you can begin to use it to run telephone conferences.  You can access the number they give you from Skype, Vonage, or pretty much any phone system you have.  But you can’t access the number from Google Voice.  You just get the following message:  This number is not available for call return.  Good bye!

A pity!  But everything in life can’t be free.

This is where Tripit.com comes in. TripIt is an online service that manages all these things and creates a clear and easy-to-read itinerary for you. Before TripIt came along, I used carry a whole wad of printouts, and it could be confusing when a trip was long and complicated.  If you’ve ever arrived at an airport wondering whether you need to go to the Hertz or Budget counter to pick up your rental car, you’ll probably find this service helpful.

When you get a confirmation from a vendor by email, you simply forward it to plans@tripit.com, and TripIt recognizes you based on your e-mail address.  It parses the confirmation and extracts all the essential details.  The result is an organized plan that you can access on line or print out.  There are versions for mobile devices, including both iPhones and Blackberries.

TripIt comes in two versions, the free version and TripIt Pro, which costs $49.00 a year.  I got the Pro version last year, but I am beginning to question its value.  The main difference is that it monitors your travel and sends you alerts if your plane is canceled or delayed, a service that duplicates what most airlines do for free anyway.  It also monitors alternate flights, which can be quite helpful if you are trying to make plans after a cancellation.  Another feature in the Pro version is PointTracker, which puts all your airline points into a single place.  This is handy, but I don’t find it works all that well.

Despite a few quirks, I do find TripIt to be useful.  There seem to be few vendors whose confirmations that Trip can’t interpret.  I have used it with quite a few, including Budget, Hertz, Metropolitan Opera, Megabus, British Airways, United, US Airways, Royal Caribbean, Expedia, Orbitz, Lufthansa, Air Asia, Hilton Hotels, and Hotwire.  That is quite impressive, and I like the way it can add your opera seats into your travel plans.

For the most part, TripIt reports your trip and adds it to the schedule flawlessly although there are a few weird things:

• When you travel across time zones, it is not entirely intuitive whether you should enter local time or the time that you usually use.  Sometimes, I find that TripIt is trying to be too clever and manipulates the time of an appointment.
• I have written about this before, but it doesn’t work well at all with Megabus.  For example, if you book five Megabus round trips, TripIt interprets this as one long trip, and it is quite bothersome to separate them into discrete trips.  Even more annoying, the mobile version of TripIt doesn’t display the one piece of information that you really need: the confirmation number that you have to show to the driver!
• TripIt also seems to create random times for your hotel departures.  For example, let’s say I am leaving a Hilton in Orlando to catch a plane from Orlando to Baltimore at 5:00 in the afternoon.  TripIt might place my hotel departure after my flight departs throwing my schedule out of sequence.  With most hotels requiring you to leave by 11:00 or 12:00, I don’t know why this isn’t a default checkout time it TripIt!

TripIt is conceived as a social network, and, by default, reports all your movements to everybody in your network.  There are also connections to other social networking sites, such as LinkedIn and Facebook.  It is probably a matter of taste and a question of manipulating my privacy settings in TripIt, but I have no interest in announcing my movements to everyone in my network!

I am going to continue to use TripIt for the moment, and I have a few trips that are coming up over the next six months, but I am going to cancel my subscription to TripIt Pro.  I’ll look at other competitive products as I do find the quirks a little annoying, and may come back if they fix them.

Click here to go to the Google voice website.

First, what is Google Voice?

Google Voice is a comprehensive virtual phone system.  It enhances your existing telephone system in a variety of ways, including providing you with a phone number that can be forwarded to any of your phones.  Many readers are probably like me — you might have several phones and the best phone to reach you depends on the time of day and what you are doing.  Your friends and colleagues might try your office first.  If they get no answer, they’ll try your mobile phone.  Google Voice takes this all away.  When someone calls your Google Voice number, the call goes to any or all of your phones, and the first one to answer takes the call.  So, a single number to handles all your calls directing them to wherever you want them to land.  That in itself is pretty slick, but there are loads of other features too.

Think of it this way.  In the telephone world, each device or telephone has a number.  That is why you have a number for every phone you own.  Google Voice changes that idea.  The number is attached to a person rather than to the device.  In this respect, it’s like e-mail.  If you needed a new e-mail address for every computer you used, that would obviously be stupid.  With Google Voice, you have your personal number and you decide which phone you are going to use with that number — just as you do with e-mail!

Here are a few tips and tricks and descriptions of some of the features:

• Your choice of area code When you sign up, you get to choose the area code where you want your number.  So, if you live in the Napa Valley, but would prefer people to think you live in Piscataway, NJ, you can get a number with a Piscataway (I just love that name!) area code.  This might sound frivolous, but it could be useful if you have friends and relatives in a particular place and you want them to be able to get hold of you with a local call.  Think about the number you want carefully when you sign up.  You can change your number later, but it will cost $10 to do so.
• Vanity Numbers If you’d like a number that contains your name or your business, you can type in the word and Google Voice will offer you a variety of choices.  I managed to snag a very distinctive number with a Washington, DC area code.   DC isn’t just a cool place, but both of my adorable children live there and can reach me as a local call.
• Low International Rates Calls to the United States and Canada are free.  Calls to other countries are at very competitive rates.  For example, it costs 2 cents a minutes to call many countries, including England, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Singapore, Hong Kong.  Be careful when calling mobile phones, though.  These calls usually cost considerably more especially in Europe.
• Web Interface for calling I usually have the Google Voice web interface up all the time.  When I want to make a call, I  select the name of the person I want to call and the phone I want to call from.  First Google voice rings my selected phone and as soon as I pick up, it connects me to the person I want to talk to.  No long distance charges take place except for the modest charge if you make an international call.  This is a terrific feature that lets you make a long distance call without triggering a charge to the owner of the phone line, such as your employer.  In fact, I am beginning to use this for any call made from my office whether the call is personal or work related.
• Enhancement for your existing cell phone service With Google Voice, you can effectively turn your mobile phone plan into an unlimited calling plan.  Most cell phone companies allow you to call a select group of people (family and friends) without burning through your minutes.  With Google Voice, you can put your Google voice number on that list.  Then you can make calls by dialing your Google Voice number.  As soon as Google Voice answers, enter your PIN and then 2.  Then you are prompted to enter the number you want to reach and Google Voice connects you to that number.  As far as your mobile carrier is concerned, you have simply dialed your Google Voice number, which is on your list of favorites.
• Forwarding Schedules  You can establish schedules so that the right phone rings.  For example, my mobile phone rings on any call; my office phone rings on weekdays between 8:00 in the morning and 6:30 in the evening; and my home number rings on evenings and weekends.
• Voice mail transcription Many of my friends know how much I hate voice mail.  I won’t do that diatribe here, but I love the fact that your voice mail comes in as a text message or email,  So when some moron calls you, as so often happens, to tell you the time (I have a watch), their name (I have a contact list), and their phone number (I have caller ID), at least you can quickly glance at the text rather than waste time accessing your messages and listening to him/her droning on.  You can even use this feature as a dictation machine — call your number and leave a message while you are driving to work, and you get the message typed up for you when you arrive at the office.
• Smart Phone Applications There are applications for most smart phones that allow you to make your calls via Google Voice.  On my Blackberry, it adds this option to the menu associated with contact list.  It makes sense to use these applications when you call internationally or if you have defined the Google number as one of your favorite numbers and you’re trying to expand your minutes.
• Text Messages If you don’t have a plan that allows you to send unlimited text messages on your mobile phone, you can send them from the comfort of your computer at no charge.  Unfortunately, you cannot send international text messages any more.
• Support for people without phones Let’s say you don’t own a phone at all.  With Google Voice, you can still send and receive texts from your computer; you can pick up voicemail as a transcription or you can listen to it as it comes as an attachment to your email.  And if you stay with someone who has a phone, you can forward your calls to that number.  Also, you have somthing to write when a phone number is a mandatory field on an online form.
• Do not disturb Google Voice has a mode that will leave you in peace if you don’t want to take any calls.
• Call Screening Google Voice allows you to screen a call before opting to take it.  I don’t use that feature as almost every call I receive is identifiable because it is in my contact list.
• Elimination of long Distance Charges It seems that few people pay them now, but some people like to have a land line in the house.  With Google Voice, you can ask your phone company for the most basic plan with no long special long distance deal.  Then you can use Google Voice every time you make a call.  And if you use your computer to initiate the call, it counts as an incoming call so you could even consider eliminating a plan that offers a deal for local calls.

There seem to be very few drawbacks.  The only annoying limitation I have found so far is that Google Voice doesn’t allow you to send international texts any more.

So far, I love it!  Another way in which Google has changed my life!

When you get a confirmation from a major travel vendor, you can simply forward the confirming e-mail from your vendor (airline, hotel chain, car rental company, and so on) to plans@tripit.com.  TripIt parses the email and adds the confirmation to your itinerary.

TripIt has done quite a good job of making sure that it works with many major vendors (including the Metropolitan Opera!), and, on the whole, it works rather well.  It was especially useful when we went to Thailand last summer for a three-week trip with many flights on different airlines and many hotels purchased from different vendors.

But TripIt does not work well at all with Megabus!  First, if you book a series of journeys in a single reservation, TrpIt parses all of them as a single trip, and it is a pain in the neck to split them up. Another limitation is that the mobile version of TripIt for the Blackberry does not display the most vital piece of information: the confirmation number that you have to show the driver when you board the bus.

This drove me into a near panic as I was driving to catch a Megabus this morning.  Unusually, I hadn’t printed my itinerary before leaving the house, and when i checked it on the Blackberry, I found it was not there.

Fortunately, I was able to contact friends who retrieved the vital number from the TripIt website and sent it to me by e-mail.

But it does mean that the mobile version of TripIt for the Blackberry is almost useless as a tool to support Megabus trips!

When traveling overseas, though, calling can be quite expensive if you don’t plan carefully.  Part of my present system involves the use of Vonage, a provider of VOIP telephone service.  (VOIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol).

Vonage’s VOIP service works like this.  You get a little device from Vonage that you attach to the router that comes with your broadband service using an Ethernet wire.  Then you attach a standard telephone to the Vonage device, and that is all there is to it.

The telephone now has a dial tone, and for $25.99 a month you enjoy unlimited calling to the United States and about sixty other countries, including most of Western Europe, Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong, Australia, Argentina, Japan, Brazil, and New Zealand. But the benefits of Vonage to the traveler don’t stop there.  Here are some other things you can do if you have Vonage service.

• Voice Mail — Friends don’t send friends voice mail!  People who know me well don’t usually leave me voice mail as they know how I hate it with a passion!

How many people leave information that you can get from caller ID?  (Name, number, and time of call!)  How annoying is that?  But Vonage’s voice mail, an included service, makes it a little better.  You get an e-mail with the voice mail as an attachment and a text transcript of what the person said.  To me, this almost converts voice mail into an acceptable way of communicating with others!  And it is quite useful when you are away from home.  Apologies for the diatribe!

• Virtual Numbers — for a small monthly fee, you can get a virtual number.  For example, I pay an extra $4.99 a month to have a number in central London.  These numbers connect to your home phone.  So, when I am in London, I can call home using a local number from my UK pay-as-you-go mobile phone, completely avoiding international charges.  It is also great to give out that number to my friends in England so that they can call me cheaply.  Vonage offers vitual numbers in the USA, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Romania, Spain, and the United Kingdom.  So, if there you travel to one of these countries often, it makes sense to have a number that is a local number there.
• Portability — this is cool.  When you are traveling, you can pack your Vonage device and phone and plug it into the router at your destination.  This basically means that I can have an American number and connection when I travel. I recently did some consulting for an organization based in Egypt.  Once the Vonage device was installed for them, they were able to make calls to all the countries Very handy and cost effective to have a Maryland number when I am on the road.
• Call Forwarding – when you are traveling you can forward your calls to one or more phones that will ring simultaneously if called.  (This includes the ability to forward calls to numbers at your destination.
• Do Not Disturb – you can make sure that your phone doesn’t ring when you don’t want to be disturbed.  This is easy to switch on and off either through the phone or by accessing Vonage’s website.

This might sound rather like an advertisement for Vonage, but it isn’t.  I really find it to be very, very useful.  And there are a few negatives.  For one thing, I sometimes worry about the financial stability of Vonage.  I would truly hate it if it went away.  My only other reservation is that I once had an overpayment of my account.  Getting that money back was like extracting blood from the proverbial stone, and it involved repeated calls and hours of wasted time.

Some readers may feel cheated because they’ve been away and they come back home to find huge mobile phone bills waiting for them.  Most carriers have international calling plans that allow customers to phone home at a discounted rate, but it is still not exactly cheap.  For example, AT&T offers an international calling plan for an extra $5.00 per month.  Then you can use your cell phone abroad.   If you have that plan and you’re in England, you can then phone back to the United States for $0.20 per minute, which is not too bad, but you also have to pay that rate if you want to make a call to an English number.  Worse, when your English friends call you, they have to pay international charges because they are calling an American number.

My usual solution to this problem is to get a local “pay-as-you-go” plan in the country you are visiting.  I have done this in Spain, Italy, Greece, Thailand, and England, and it works quite well.  This is what you need to do.

1.  First make sure that your phone uses GSM technology.  This is the most popular standard for cellular phones internationally.  (In the United States, AT&T and T-Mobile use GSM, but Verizon doesn’t.)  If you are Verizon subscriber, you can usually get a quad band phone for a reasonable price on eBay.

2.  Make sure that your phone is a quad-band phone.  This basically means that it will work on pretty much all the frequencies that are used around the world.  (Dual band phones bought in the United States won’t work at all, and tri-band results are somewhat unpredictable.)

3.  Make sure that your phone is “unlocked.”  When you buy a phone in the United States, a phone company typically sells it to you for just a fraction of its real cost.  They recover the cost of the phone through your monthly charges, and they lock the phone to the carrier so that you can’t get a cheap phone and then switch to another carrier.  AT&T and T-Mobile are both willing to give you the unlock code and they tell you how to unlock the phone after you have paid your bill for a few months.  You can also buy unlocked phones on eBay.

4.  Go to a mobile phone shop in the country you are visiting, and ask for a SIM card.  This is the subscriber identity module, and it is a little chip that looks a bit like the SD cards used in cameras.  You can usually get one for a very low price or sometimes they are free, and this establishes your account with the local phone company, and it comes with a local mobile number.  You can then top up your account with money whenever it is running short.

I use O2, when I am in the UK.  My rates are 25 pence a minutes for the first three minutes on any a particular day and 3 pence a minute for the rest of the day.  I also have a “bolt on” that cost me a one-time charge of five pounds.  This allows me to call the United States on evenings and weekends for 10 pence a minute.  Text messaging is free and unlimited to UK numbers on this plan and 10 pence to send a text to the US.

There is a trend to move towards plans that have a monthly cost, but those are probably suitable only for the very frequent visitor or a person who is staying for a few moths.

A few tips:

1.  Remember that in most countries it is relatively expensive to call a mobile phone.  So, you can run up that large bill at home if your family calls you on your mobile.  It is better to call them.  You can always call back based on the caller ID.

2.  Don’t put too much money in the phone.  O-2 cancels accounts if they have not been used for six months.  (I sometimes make a short call from the United States to stop that from happening.)

3.  In many countries (Italy, Spain, and Thailand, for example), you need to have identification with you to get a SIM card.  Make sure you have your passport with you when you go shopping.

4.  Plans are frequently changing.  Go to the vendor and tell them what you want to do.  They will frequently give you good advice about the optimal plan.

5.  Most phones have dual voltage chargers.  Make sure that the charger can be used anywhere in the world.  It’s a real bore if you need to carry two of them.

6.  There is a good case for using the same phone as you usually use.  (I use a Blackberry.  It is convenient to have my address book on the phone, but I also don’t have to figure out how to use a different phone.)

7.  Calling from cruise ships can be painfully expensive.  My best advice is simply not to do it!  Also, if a ship is in or near a port, make sure that you are connected to the local phone company rather than the cruise ship’s connection.

8. “Pay as you go” plans are quite common in Europe, and you can usually top up your phone almost anywhere (banks, grocery stores, post offices, and so on).  Mine comes with a card.  You hand over the money and the vendor swipes the card.  You almost instantly get a text confirming that your payment has been credited to your account.

I’ll put more information in a future post about how I stay in touch while abroad at relatively low cost.