I am not a happy traveler. I have friends who treat travel as a great adventure and love every minute of their experiences, but not I. For me travel is a means to an end, something to be endured.

There was a time - back in the 1980's - when travel was still reasonably civilized but now we have to tolerate endless queues, get crappy in-flight service (certain airlines now plan to even charge for pillows!), and if we're really lucky, have the TSA treat us like criminals, confiscate our laptops on a whim, and demand that we surrender our shampoo.

That said, I have just found one small but brilliant light in this vale of gloom that actually does make travel less painful. It is a free service called TripIt that consolidates your itineraries, adds destination weather, maps and directions, allows you to share your travel plans with others, and adds a measure of social networking for good luck. It becomes, in effect, your personal travel assistant.

You can start to use TripIt by either registering online or by simply sending the service an itinerary from any of the major travel vendors such as airlines, car rental companies, and hotels. If you start by mailing an itinerary, TripIt sets up an account for you immediately, responds with an e-mail that includes a link to complete your registration (this is, by the way, a very clever technique), and parses the itinerary into its own internal format.

Here’s where things get really clever: When you send other itineraries, TripIt figures out the dates and locations (the company calls the software that does this job “The Itinerator”) and merges them into a combined itinerary.

TripIt then adds detail such as the predicted weather in each location, links to the airlines you booked on for flight status and online check-in, and provides travel guide information for your destinations.

TripIt also provides a bookmarklet, which allows you to go to any Web page, select content, and save it to one of your itineraries.

Through TripIt you can access your accounts on Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, LinkedIn, mail.com, and Yahoo to discover which of your contacts are using TripIt and invite those who aren’t to use the service. When contacts agree to link with you, you can see each other’s travel plans and TripIt notifies you when you are both in the same locale (these are called “closeness alerts”).

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.