http://www.openparenthesis.org/2007/08/14/tripit/

I was introduced to Tripit — a new social travel application — in a pretty funny way. I received an email, inviting me to the service from Tara Hunt:

[via email]

TripIt beta — We organize your travel.

Tara E Hunt has invited you to the private Beta test program for TripIt, the intelligent travel organizer.

Tara E Hunt’s message to you:

Hey Stowe, You’d laugh if you sat in on our brainstorming session with these guys today, you were used as the example of the perfect traveler to ask advice from. :) I thought I’d invite you and see what you thought. They have loads of work to do, but the coolest thing is that you can forward your confirmation email from an airline, etc. and it will add it to your itinerary auto-magically. Tara

I have set up a meeting later this week to talk to the Tripit guys, but I have already spent some time with the app, and what I see I really, really like.

First Look

The design is organized around a calendar and a folio of trips.

I started a new trip with a Trip Search, which allows me to uses various services — Expedia, Orbitz, and so on, and various airlines, hotels , and car rentals companies:

If you use the integrated services, the resulting travel plans are incorporated directly into your folio of trips:

Likewise, when I made a trip with an unintegrated service, in this case Jetblue, I was able to simply forward the email confirmation to a dedicated email address from the services, and the travel appeared in my plans:

[Update: I tried with an email from Virgin Atlantic, and Tripit defaulted to including as a note, since it doesn’t yet know how to make sense of VA emails. Groan.]

The bugaboo of these sorts of integrations is when changes are made, as way the case with my Jetblue travel. I forwarded the modified trip information, and this was the result:

Even though the two tickets have the same confirmation number, I am not exactly sure how Tripit would do better than this: it could have been an additional flight added to the existing itinerary. So Manually deleting the one when adding the other makes sense. However, I would have hoped that Tripit would associate the two into the same trip, which it did not. But, manually associating the new with the old is a simple process.

Tripit allows you to add notes to your itinerary:

And they are experimenting with an online travel service, integrated with your trips:

Likewise, they are working on a toolbar to add random stuff from the Web to your trips, but I can’t seem to get it to work.

Social Side of Tripit

Tripit is a social app, so (once you actually have friends using it) you can share travel calendars a la Dopplr (as I reviewed back in March):

I see an interesting battle looming here. Tripit has staked a claim to the ‘travel transaction’ side of things, while trying to experiment with social network and social media services, too. Dopplr is pretty bare bones naked social travel DNA.

What I am personally most interested in is a minimal integration with transactions — just the importing of the data from the emails, which Tripit does well, and Dopplr not at all at this time— but I am much, much more interested in recommendations from friends and coordination with them.

I had a long conversation in Facebook the other day with David Churbuck about some place to eat in Lugano, which should really be taking place in one of these social travel apps, but neither really provides me the social tools to do that. Facebook doesn’t really either: it could have just as well been in email. But I would rather collate such stuff in my travel folio somehow.

I don’t just want to know that a friend is in town, I want to get on her agenda, start to plan a dinner or a meeting. That’s why the coarsely-grained time in Dopplr, where the day is the smallest quantum of time is the day — is just a pain: no real help on the coordination, since I don’t know if I can ask her to a lunch meeting or not. And even if I did have a better grasp of her itinerary (as in Tripit), what sorts of tools do we need to coordinate a meeting? That’s my biggest pain: not finding a map of Milan.

What’s Missing

So, Tripit is very neat, and (aside from various UI quibbles) is easy to use and ready to go… except for the real show stoppers: no RSS and no iCal subscriptions. But those should be easily added.

(And oh, that reminds me: I need to complete some reservations…)