AT A GLANCE

• Plan, book, manage and share your travel activities from one central place
• Never miss a flight, or hang around at an airport waiting... again
• Book accommodation from your BlackBerry!

Find yourself constantly struggling with travel arrangements, like connecting flights and hotel bookings? Ever forgotten your travel documents, or missed a flight due to getting a time wrong? RIM has developed BlackBerry Travel, an app designed to make it easy to plan, book, manage and share all your travel activities.

BlackBerry Travel has two parts; the mobile app and website, from where you can basically do most travel-related things, except maybe board your flight.

The app’s recently hit the South African market, so I decided to see how it works.

The app itself is available for download from the BlackBerry App World, and the website is also available locally. To access both of these, you need a BlackBerry Travel ID (which is not the same as your BlackBerry ID used on the app store). Once you’ve got it installed, and yourself registered, you can start the setup. This also involves activating or deactivating automatic trip scanning so the app can identify any travel confirmation mails that arrive in your inbox to, which are then scanned and added to BlackBerry Travel.

You can even use LinkedIn to share your travel plans or set up meetings with friends and colleagues. All well and good... but I wanted to find out what you could actually use the app for! 

You can:

• Book flights – select your airports and flights. Sort it by arrival time, departure time or duration of the flight
• Book hotels – search for hotels at your destination. Sort it by price, top picks, “distance from…”, price range or star ranking - there over 110,000 hotels worldwide in the database
• Local search – search for shopping, nightlife or restaurants close-by
• Sync your flights, car rentals, and hotel bookings with your calendar 

Planning a trip with the app (I didn’t have any flight confirmations in my inbox at the time) is really easy. I searched for flights and selected ones that suited me. Done. Even the most complex itinerary consisting of multi-leg journeys and multiple booking partners can be easily imported and is as simple to manage using the BlackBerry Travel itinerary view.

When booking and planning your trip, you’ll see two tabs: itinerary and services. They’re there to make planning your trip that much easier. Under itinerary, you can search flights and hotels or manually enter your travel details, and even share your trip. The services tab provides you with weather information, and you can even sign in to your LinkedIn account from there to share your travels with your connections, or organise a meeting.

You can book and pay for your accommodation from within the app – very handy, except that all prices were listed in US Dollars, and I couldn’t find any way to change it. There is, however, a handy currency converter built-into the app to work things out. You can’t book flights through the app though, so it’s best to book your flight with your preferred airline and either let it add your information (through the automatic trip scanning), type it in manually, or select “add to BlackBerry Travel” from the message’s menu.

BlackBerry Travel will also notify you if there are any changes to your trip – like delays – so you to be able to plan accordingly. Also, the location aware search will help you find other points of interest, such as shopping and top tourist attractions based on your exact location. 

To accompany the mobile app, RIM has provided a great web portal - you can also import your WorldMate travel itineraries and update your profile. (It also gives a more comprehensive view of, for example, the extensive car hire options available. Obviously due to the fact that there is just simply more space to display everything.) You can also print out all your travel documents from the portal...

The app should will wonderfully for BlackBerry high flyers who are always on-the-go, especially if you’re not working through a travel agency or worried about this extra-short connecting flights. You'll definitely save time and effort, taking away the hassle of travel.

Turn ons

• A central place to keep your travel details
• Definitely one of the better-looking apps from RIM
• Automatic updates to your travel details – handy if there’s a delay
• Social media integration
• You can import all your WorldMate itineraries to the app

Turn offs

• I could not figure out how to change the default currency to anything but US Dollar
• No clear indication if you can book and pay for flights from the app
• Only integrated with LinkedIn – more social networking platforms would be nice

Price:  Free