FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - TripIT itinerary organizer-what do you think?
Old Sep 23, 2007, 12:20 pm
  #13  
gbrockway
 
Join Date: Jun 2007
Location: San Francisco, CA
Posts: 1
Thanks and thoughts from TripIt

Hello everyone,
Thanks for the feedback and for giving TripIt a try. I’m the president and co-founder of TripIt and thought it might be helpful to share my thoughts regarding the comments above…

• To start, please remember that TripIt is still in beta and has been open to the world for less than a week, which means we have a lot more fun features in the works. The comments we are getting from actual users are incredibly helpful in determining what we build next, so please keep them coming!

• Regarding the TripIt Itinerator’s ability to parse information, we are not yet 100%, but every email you send us helps the Itinerator improve. We started by focusing on the US market, but are expanding this quickly. At the moment, the Itinerator supports over 70 booking services and we are adding more every day. (This technology is very cool, super flexible and one of the things we are most proud of.) The following may be more info than you want, but one challenge we have is that each booking service has numerous formats and they change. Some changes the system handles automatically and some require us to tweak the Itinerator. A second challenge is that email services often modify outgoing emails in subtle ways that people don’t see, but that drive computers crazy. Bottom line is today we are very good with the big online booking sites and as we see more volume, TripIt will continue to get better with a growing number of suppliers and travel agencies.

• Regarding privacy, I want to emphasize that we take confidentiality extremely seriously. Most of our team has been in the online travel industry for many years (the majority from Hotwire), and we know very well that if we don’t treat confidential user information appropriately, we won’t have users very long. For specifics, please check out our privacy policy and if you have any concerns, let us know. We want to make it as clear as possible that we do not share a customer’s personal travel information with advertisers.

• To my surprise, we get the question “how will TripIt make money” a lot. To be clear, TripIt will not charge travelers for the service. Fortunately, travel is the largest ecommerce category and there are a number of proven ways to make money without being in the booking business. TripIt will be advertiser supported and offer add-on services to users in tasteful and helpful manner. Some examples for a hypothetical trip to Boston include:
o Here are a few offers from merchants in Boston you might find useful.
o You’ve booked a hotel, would you like to book a restaurant or activity in the area?
o We also have a TripSearch tool that helps travelers save time and search the sites they like best which is a revenue opportunity for us.

In the end, we believe that we will have a successful business as long as we build a service that people genuinely find helpful. Achieving the goal of being useful is where our energy is focused.

Anyway, we’ve had a gratifying initial response from users in the past week with feedback and suggestions. We’re working furiously to incorporate all this into future iterations of the service. If you are interested in keeping tabs on our progress, please sign up for our email at TripIt or subscribe to our blog.

Finally, if you like what we are doing, the best way you can help us is to tell your friends or better yet invite them to be Friends in TripIt so you can stay in touch on the road. If you have any issues with TripIt at all, please send them to us and we’ll get them in the queue for development. I personally read every email that comes in.

Best regards,
Gregg Brockway
President & co-founder
TripIt
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