Regus Business Lounges with TripIt Pro

I’ve been using the web service TripIt for several years: it’s a good way of organizing and sharing travel details (a lot easier than trying to manage a lot of emails) and its ability to parse air and hotel confirmations into structured data is impressive.

TripIt offers a $49/year TripIt Pro which is available with a 30-day trial, so, given that I was setting out on a 24-day complex trip, it seemed like a good chance to try it out.

Among the “Pro” benefits is what seems to be a throwaway perk described as “Complimentary 1-year membership to Regus Gold”:

There’s almost no information about this feature on TripIt’s website (which is why it seems like a throwaway), but it turns out that this is actually a pretty valuable benefit if you find yourself in a a lot strange cities with need for a desk, wifi and coffee. The “business lounges,” it seems, are a sort of “gateway drug” to upsell Regus’s short-term office product: I’m sitting in the lounge in Frankfurt in the lobby of an office complex as I type this, in something called a ThinkPod that looks like this:

It’s got power, a comfortable chair, a desk, and 15 down / 18 up wifi. What more could I need? To get here I caught the S8 from Frankfurt Airport (4.10 EUR fare, buy from ticket machines on the platform) to the main train station (Hauptbahnhof) and walked about 2 minutes. I showed the desk clerk my Regus registration email, and, shazam, I was good to go.

My TripIt Pro 30-day trial expires in a few days, and I’m not sure I’ll up for the $49/year fee, as I don’t expect to be traveling a lot over the next year (yes, I know, I say that all the time) and I haven’t found TripIt Pro’s other trip-monitoring and alerting features particularly useful (albeit perhaps because my trip has gone well so far). But if you’re looking for handy workspaces in cities around the world, you might want to take a look at it.