If you have travel plans in your future – and here’s hoping you do! – you can take a step or two to make your journey a little more green, or environmentally friendly, with the new TripSketch Green Traveler app on your Nokia Symbian OS, S60 5.0 device. The app comes to Ovi Store from the U.S.-based TripSketch Corp., and offers eco-savvy tips and guidance about hotels, dining, attractions and more for 79 different cities in the United States, Canada and Europe.

When you first start the app, it asks you to confirm that it is OK to access location information (via GPS), as well as the calendar built in to your device. For location, the app then knows what is closest to you, and it also displays the major cities covered by TripSketch in this app.

From there, you can quickly scroll to pick a city that may interest you – or one where you know you are going next month, like London. You simply click on that city name to see the various category options for that destination, as noted in the screenshot below.

Click on any of those category choices to see what is available to you. Now, if any of the lists appear to be short, remember, this app is only offering you information about the best options that have a green or eco-related hook behind them. Making choices this way night appear to limit your options, but it does give you the satisfaction of knowing you are making a decision that has an ethical leg to stand on.

You can see options for restaurants and hotels, as the two examples below show you:

And, within each listing, you will see a concise, well-written description, as well as details for more information, including the website for the service or attraction, contact information, and its location on a map (note: at the moment, this app uses Google Maps, instead of Ovi Maps – maybe that will happen in a new version …).

Listings for dining, attractions and tours have the added benefit of being able to add a calendar notation for the event, so you can quickly block out the time and date on the calendar built in to your Nokia device.

I like the layout of this app a lot. It is easy to follow the various prompts, and the descriptions for the various services that you might try are all easy to understand. (TripSketch has a small army of freelance writers that focus on content for the different cities.) It would be nice if you could conduct a search on a specific city, but at the moment everything within the app is simply menu driven. Additionally, right now, the app does not include user-generated content, as we have seen previously with this Nokia app.

The TripSketch Green Traveler packs a lot of information in a small Web Runtime widget; and it is this level of detail that shines through. It is easy to see why TripSketch Green Traveler was named one of three finalists in the Eco/Being Green category of Forum Nokia’s 2010 Calling All Innovators contest (finalists were just posted today!).

So, before you pack your bags for your next trip, make sure you download TripSketch Green Traveler first. It is available for $1.99 (USD) in Ovi Store.

Then, be sure to tell us about your travels – we’d love to know what apps you use while making travel plans – in the Comments section below.