[helloburin]

This is great! I work as a dev on a related travel product (mentioned in a comment here actually) and our in-progress redesign has the things you mention as priorities (speed/clarity).

I'm going to go ahead and say travel apps in general suck, so I'm not surprised to hear your sentiment towards TripIt's iPhone app haha.

One thing that I appreciate is that you understand the difficulty in designing these kinds of apps. On the surface it's "oh. well it's really just a bunch of lists and buttons with labels and text", and I think that's the approach a LOT of travel companies take. They value the tech/info more than the way it's presented. Luckily there is a LOT of room for improvement in this industry, and with devs who care about experience and designers who understand tech we should be able to make a big dent. I honestly thought TripIt would be one of those companies though...