If you link your Avis and TripIt accounts, you now can just click on imported flight or hotel bookings from other suppliers on the Avis.com homepage and book a car rental to round out your travel plans.
Avis and TripIt, the itinerary management service, have thus streamlined the car rental booking process on Avis.com, and the company believes it became the first car rental firm to optionally import customers' TripIt itineraries using TripIt's open technology platform.
In a nutshell, Avis enables TripIt members to book an Avis car rental on Avis.com without entering any other information.
There is no need to enter the traveler's name, arrival/departure date, time or locations, email address, airline name or flight number, Avis says.
Here's how it works:
You can sign up for Avis and TripIt accounts on their respective websites, and then navigate to Avis.com/tripitservice to link the accounts.
TripIt users often email their flight and hotel confirmations to [email protected] and TripIt organizes them into itineraries.
So if you visit Avis.com and authorize Avis to retrieve your current trips from TripIt, then they will be displayed on the bottom right of the Avis.com homepage and also on the Avis' TripIt service page.
You can then just click on the upcoming trip and begin the car rental booking process without having to input travel dates or destinations.
For example, if you have an upcoming flight to Sarasota, Fla., just click on the upcoming trip and you may see the following display:
There's no need to enter travel dates or your pickup city or airport.
And, once you've booked your car rental, if you have authorized Avis to do so in you Avis.com preferences, Avis will automatically transmit your car rental information to TripIt, which will place it in your TripIt itinerary, too.
"... The partnership brings to life the vision we've had for TripIt's technology since the very beginning: to streamline the travel process and make life easier for travelers," says Gregg Brockway, general manager of TripIt, which is a unit of Concur.
Avis uses OAuth to obtain users' authorizations to access their information from TripIt, and the TripIt API to display travelers' itineraries on Avis.com.
“The vast majority of people typically make airline and hotel reservations first, before they reserve a rental car,” says Tom Gartland, executive vice president of sales, marketing and customer care for Avis Budget Group, parent company of Avis. “This partnership will help travelers who have completed their air and hotel arrangements and provide them with an even faster way to add an Avis rental to their trip. TripIt members will benefit from not having to remember travel dates, times or flight information, and having their rental car arrangements directly connected with their other travel plans.”
There is no cost to use the service.