As someone who has been home for one weekend of the past six, I know that traveling can be a real pain. While the Internet has eased some burdens such as scheduling and price hunting, it has also created new ones, such as organizing trip details when plans are often made across several sites. That is where a site like TripIt comes in.
There are a lot of online traveling sites such as Kayak (our coverage), but TripIt sets itself apart by organizing your travel information after you have scheduled it.
Using TripIt is as simple as forwarding the travel itinerary email that you get sent when you book a site online to the email address, plans@tripit.com. Assuming you’ve sent the email from an address you have registered to your TripIt account, the service will then build you a new itinerary within TripIt that adds several useful items such as weather information, access to maps of the area, pictures of the area from Flickr and other features. The great thing about forwarding these plans is that TripIt will take several different details such as a flight and hotel booked on separate sites, and place them together one one page.
“We have so many overlapping applications, and the next frontier is getting them to work better together,” says Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, one of the site’s investors.
The service also has social features that allow you to share plans with friends and find out when someone you know is near you on a trip. In this regard, TripIt is similar to a service like Dopplr, but TripIt has offers organizational tools far beyond that service.
The best feature of TripIt is the ease with which you can access all of your organized travel information on a mobile device. Printing out and organizing multiple sheets of paper for various reservations is a hassle. The recently launched TripIt Mobile eliminates that waste.
This latest $5.1 million series B round was led by Sabre Holdings, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and European Founders Fund. The San Francisco-based company previously raised $1 million last year from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (our coverage).
This new investment will be used to expand development, marketing and support for those users who have signed up with the service. Additionally, with the European Founders Fund on board, TripIt hopes to expand its service globally.
4 Comments
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BBY said:
It is worth mentioning WorldMate Live, which offers a similar service, and has a lot of traction in the BlackBerry community.
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TJ Mahony said:
Any comments on how they make money? I have been using the service and even covered it on our blog, but I’m having trouble understanding the revenue model. I guess if they reach critical mass they can send targeted offers based on your destination. Is that the plan?
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Danny said:
I’ve been using MyVector (www.myvector.info) since 2006. It’s similar to what dopplr started marketing late 07. Their latest news letter eluded to a ’sustainable’ revenue model due sometime this year. I guess we’ll have to wait and see how that unfolds…
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Microsoft buys travel site Farecast for $115M » VentureBeat said:
[...] Kayak raised $196 million and purchased rival site Sidestep for $193 million last December. Also, as we reported this morning, online travel organization site TripIt, just received a fresh $5.1 million round of [...]