TravelMuse revamps online trip planning tools

I caught the first two episodes of Ewan McGregor’s Long Way Around motorcycle journey the other night and was struck by the extraordinary amount of planning that went into the trip. Granted McGregor and Boorman had a number of concerns outside the scope of most of our trips — motorcycle repairs, film equipment, medical supplies for remote areas and more — but even so I couldn’t help thinking, hey guys, you might be over-braining it a bit.

There’s a spectrum of travel planning that seems to run somewhere from the incredibly thorough planning detailed in the Long Way Around, to those that just jump on a plane and go. Most of us fall somewhere in the middle.

Through I’m a fan of planning with good old fashioned maps, books and a pen and paper, there’s something to be said for the internet as travel planning tool, especially when you’re trying to coordinate a trip with someone on the other side of the country (or world).

TravelMuse, one of the many trip planning websites out there, recently revamped its planning tools to make planning a trip easier and more fun.

Among the more useful features in the recent update is the redesigned TravelMuse bookmarker, which allows you to save pages, photos and text from any website into your personal trip folder. The best new features is that if you include an address with the bookmarked info, TravelMuse will now include it in its other great new feature — an interactive map of your trip.

The map view displays all of your saved items and offers some extras like a drop-down menu showing items saved by other TravelMuse members, another menu to view any available photos, videos and Wikipedia entries and a Google search box to grab any useful data from Google Local.

There’s also a revamped item view with new sorting options and the ability to integrate with your Facebook account, should you have one. The Facebook features include the ability post questions to your Facebook account — for example, ask your friends in London what you should see while you’re there. TravelMuse will then pull in any replies and automatically add them to your trip.

And of course what sort of website would offer new features without some sort of widget for you to share them with the world? Yes, TravelMuse has a new “Trip Widget,” so you can embed your plans in your blog or any other webpage that allows you to paste in HTML.

There are a couple of other new features as well, check out the TravelMuse blog for more details on everything that’s new.