Warning: Planning Your Business Travel Is About To Get A Lot Easier!

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Until last year, I was one of those corporate frequent flyers you see at the airport.

Clocking over 100,000 miles a year, eligible for many airline travel perks and backed by a full-sized travel department to plan, book and change meetings and travel plans. Traveling that way sure is easy.

But if you’re on your own or part of a small team, figuring out reasonable fares and making sure you end up where you need to go with ever-changing meeting schedules, overbooked and canceled flights might be a bit more challenging.

Here are 2 great ideas to help you travel like the corporate guy.

First, there’s Farecast - a free service that predicts whether airlines fares to a specific destination of choice will go up, down or remain the same. If you ever wondered whether today, next week or next month would be the best time to buy an affordable ticket, you should take them for a spin. This is a great service - and it’s 100% free.

Second, there’s TripSync - an on-demand travel manager that lets you book your trips like the corporate travel agencies do.

Let’s say you’re in Chicago and you schedule a tentative meeting with a client in NYC. As soon as you enter the entry into Outlook Calendar, a plugin lets you create your travel itinerary right there and then.

Browse flight options, cost, alternate airports and reserve your hotel and rental car. Then, while waiting for your customer to confirm the meeting, put your itinerary on 24 hour hold, lock in your rates and simply confirm when you’re ready.

Change of plan? Change the meeting in Outlook and Tripsync lets you adjust your trip and automatically updates your schedules.

The great thing of all this - you can do all of this from a web-enabled mobile device as well as from your desktop. If you’re not an Outlook user, TripSync comes with plugins for Firefox and Microsoft Explorer.

Using TripSync is free. We recommend you take it for a spin!