I use Tripit to manage my travel. It’s a service to consolidate all of your travel plans. Whenever you receive mail from an airline, hotel, or other travel service, you simply forward the mail to plans@tripit.com. Tripit will automatically read all of the information from your mail and create an itinerary for you. It also allows your to share your plans with other people, and you can add the plans to iCal or Google calendar automatically.
Today, Tripit really saved me. I booked a trip to San Francisco last week for next Tuesday through the end of the month. Or so I thought. When I went on Tripit to view my plans, I saw that there were two itineraries: one for the hotel and one for the flight. This was odd, since Tripit will combine locations that occur on the same dates. On closer inspection, I was dismayed to find out that I had booked the flights for March instead of February; I hadn’t noticed earlier since the days and dates of February and March are identical!
I was able to rebook by tickets on Virgin America without paying any change fees. I only had to play a higher rate for the outgoing flight.
I would say that I was lucky to catch the mis-booked flights, but it wasn’t luck at all. It was the design of Tripit that alerted me to my mistake.