Passport? Check. Good book? Check. BlackBerry? Check--I brought it along so I could monitor our flight's departure time. "Don't worry. I won't obsess about reading my e-mails during our vacation," I told my fiance as we headed out the door for the airport. Alas, when we reached the gate, the airline posted that our flight was delayed, which caused us to miss our connection.

With the travel application loaded on the BlackBerry, I felt somewhat in control of the situation. I looked up alternative flights to Belize for that same day, and the airline issued us paper tickets for the substituted flight, which was on a different airline. It was empowering to have an instant resource in my pocket that gave me some leverage when dealing with the ticket agent.

If you're a frequent flier, a travel service and a data-connected smart phone can be worthwhile investments. They enable you to search for flights, track your flight's status, and look up the phone numbers of car rental companies and hotel chains.

Handmark and MobiMate offer smart-phone software designed to help travelers find important details about their trip. Each company does a good job of gathering travel information from the Web and packaging it in an organized, one-stop-shop application. Then you can view your options in one place instead of having to search across several different Web sites.

When you search for information, each app typically takes only a few seconds to serve up the results (response time depends to some extent on your phone's data network speed, however). Many of the travel categories in Handmark's Pocket Express Travel and MobiMate's WorldMate Live are similar, though each service has some unique features. Also, their interface designs and the information sources they draw on differ. I downloaded the beta version of each app for a closer look...

Pocket Express Travel

I downloaded Handmark's Pocket Express Travel to my BlackBerry 8830 from Sprint. Handmark offers the service at its mobile portal for news, 411 search, weather, and more.

Pocket Express Travel is available at three tiers of service: free, Executive, and Elite. The free service delivers a lot of features: access to domestic and international flight schedules; a hotel search tool; a currency converter; and a list of phone numbers for major U.S.-based airlines, hotels, car rentals, cruise lines, and online travel services (such as Expedia, Orbitz, and Travelocity).

Flight Information

The free features that I found most useful were the flight schedules. I entered my starting point (the app recognizes city and airport codes), my destination, and my departure date. Within 10 seconds, Pocket Express served up more than a dozen available flights to my destination. I narrowed these results down by specifying airline and nonstop flights only.

To check the status of any flight-- your own or for someone else's--you musto subscribe to Pocket Express Elite ($7 a month or $70 a year). Let's say you're planning to pick up a friend who's traveling on United Airlines flight 79. You enter 79 in the Flight field and select United Airlines in the Airline field. (Since the app doesn't recognize the BlackBerry 8830's alphanumeric keypad, however, you have to press the <Alt> key and then the numbers.) Pocket Express serves up several results, including details about the flight's departure and arrival.

On a few of the flights that I looked up, the system (which is based on the Official Airline Guide's database) provided some not-so-helpful information. For example, in one instance it reported "No Status Derivable," 45 minutes before a flight was scheduled to arrive. When I checked again 5 minutes later, it simply said "Delayed." It would have been nice to get a revised estimated time of arrival, at least. I checked United's Web site, which provided the actual departure time and the new ETA, as well as the reason for the delay.

Live Help

My experience with Pocket Express's live agent-assistance was a little better. I simply placed a phone call to the airline and a rep helped me on the spot. I had to wait on hold for a short time while the rep looked up the flight status, but then she returned with the updated ETA. This type of personal assistance is available around the clock as part of the Pocket Express Elite service, which costs $10 a month or $100 a year. The reps will help you with just about any travel-related activity, including making airline reservations, finding local businesses, and buying tickets for events in the area.

To reach an agent, I selected the 24/7 Live Travel option from the Pocket Express Travel menu. A pop-up window asked if I wanted to allow the program to initiate a call. If you need help but aren't an Elite subscriber, you can still use live-assist for $35, a Handmark spokesperson told me. Help with booking a hotel or car rental is free, she said.

To try Pocket Express, visit the service's Web site and enter your cell phone number. You'll receive a text message on your handset with a link to an over-the-air software download. The app works on BlackBerrys, Treos, Windows Mobile phones (such as the AT&T 8525, Motorola Q, and T-Mobile Dash), and several Java-based handsets such as the Razr. The Handmark spokesperson told me that the company is working on a version for the Symbian platform (mainly used in Nokia phones and some Sony Ericssons), too, but she couldn't confirm when that vwersion will be available.

WorldMate Live for BlackBerrys

MobiMate offers BlackBerry users a $10-a-month service that sends flight and meeting alerts to the device. Called WorldMate Live, the application pings travelers about delays or cancellations as soon as it receives an update from its source, FlightStats.com.

Another new feature for the BlackBerry platform is the itinerary manager, which has been available for some time on the Palm and Windows Mobile versions of WorldMate Professional. Here's how it works: To obtain notifications, you must enter the details of your itinerary (country, city, date, and itinerary name) on WorldMate Live's Web site. This can be fairly labor-intensive if you want to include information on hotels, car rentals, meetings, and so on. However, MobiMate provides an add-on program for Outlook to make things easier. From Outlook, you export any e-mail confirmations that you receive from online travel services, airlines, hotels, car rental companies, and travel agencies into the WorldMate Live Web site. Based on the data in those confirmations, WorldMate Live pieces together your itinerary. In the program's current beta stage, the list of supported vendors is pretty small, but WorldMate plans to add more later.

Not Perfect Yet

After I created a sample itinerary on my WorldMate Live account, the service pushed information to the Verizon BlackBerry 8830 that I used for testing the app. On the day of my trip, I received an alert about my flight's delayed status, as well as a welcome message when my flight landed at my destination. WorldMate Live provided hot links to phone numbers and maps of the area as part of the details in the itinerary manager, but I had to manually enter an address on the map or select one from my address book. I would have preferred to select the addresses that were already in my itinerary manager, which would have enabled me to get driving directions from the car rental location to my hotel.

The other features in WorldMate Live--flight status information, flight schedules, a weather report, a currency converter, world clocks, and a global day and night map--have been staples in the Pro version for a while.

WorldMate Live for BlackBerrys will be available this fall, according to MobiMate, and support for other mobile OSs is likely to appear next year. If you'd like to check out WorldMate Live's beta application, visit the site and click the link to request an invitation to the program.

What's your favorite mobile travel app? Drop us a line.