It really is time to think about booking my travel to some upcoming events. In early March, I meeting with 6 other fabulous women I met at Ali Brown’s Online Success Blueprint Workshop back in November. Marketing is an ever-changing business and I finally realized last year that I need to invest in seeing what others are doing. It was a fabulous event and I’ll probably talk more about it once the details for this year’s workshop are announced.

Part of what makes the event such a terrific one are the people who attend–almost all solopreneurs, all thinking big about the future of their business. At the end a few of us pledged to create a mastermind (Think and Grow Rich and had been prerequisite reading for the workshop) to continue building on what we learned. We have a once monthly meeting by phone, an online forum of our own for in-between questions and brainstorming, and will be meeting in-person for the first time in March at one of the members’ homes in Florida.

And in April I’m going to another workshop help by Fabienne Fredricksen in Connecticut. Fabienne already had a successful business coaching practice of her own but it really took off after becoming one of Ali’s proteges. Her workshop combines online & offline marketing for solopreneurs with work on creating the right mindset as well.

Anyway. I thought I’d share two resources that have been invaluable to me in booking flights in the past year. Farecast is where you go before you book your flights. It’s a little bit like Travelocity’s fare alert–in that you can set up an alert to tell you what’s happening with flights on the days you want. But it goes a step further to tell you whether you should buy today or wait–based on whether it expects today’s fare price to go up or down over the next seven days based on a ton of data it has compiled. It does something similar for hotels too.

After you buy, go to Yapta and enter in your flight info. This site will track prices for your exact flights and email you if they drop. If it does, Yapta will also tell you how to contact the airline for a refund or voucher for the difference! I haven’t had that happen yet, but it certainly can’t hurt to try.

And then email each of your confirmation receipts to plans@tripit.com. Trip It! is a free tool that takes all those emails, reads and consolidates them into one schedule, available online. You don’t even have to register first, once you send an email to the address above it will send you back a link to your schedule and new account. You can “clip” web pages to add to your trip (such as restaurant reviews), and you can get your trip information on your mobile phone by simply emailing a command to the site. And you can invite connections, which makes it easy to share your itinerary with others. Finally, you can sync it with your desktop calendar program. I’m trying it out now, and so far two of the three emails were automatically set up in the calendar. One, from a small hotel chain, was added an a note to my plan (I can manually enter it as well).