TripIt

TripIt upgrades mobile iPhone app

We're excited that TripIt for iPhone continues to be one of the top travel apps for the iPhone! An updated version of our free app is available now in the iPhone App Store. We think you’ll be happy with the enhancements in this version, especially since most of them were based on suggestions from travelers like you.

New features in TripIt for iPhone version 1.3 – 

- Shared Trips are now displayed  

- Restaurant reservations are now displayed

- Meetings now show their end times

- Faster data download and increased stability 

- Improved phone number support 

- Better map links for airports

- Support for longer trip notes

We will continue to update and improve TripIt for iPhone, and we’ll be adding support for TripIt Pro very soon. Keep your feedback and suggestions coming!

Getting to know TripIt Pro – Mobile Alerts

We’ll be blogging this month to tell frequent travelers a little more about each of the core features in TripIt Pro. First up, Mobile Alerts.

TripIt Pro sends you text messages and/or emails whenever something happens with your flight, like a delay, cancellation or gate change. These events can have a major impact on your travel plans, causing stress and frustration that we would like to help you avoid. Here’s a summary of all the TripIt Pro mobile alerts…

Check-In Reminder – 24 hours before your flight, you’ll get a check-in reminder, especially nice for getting the best seats, or boarding Group A on Southwest. 

Delay Alert – Get alerted whenever your flight is 15 or more minutes late.

Cancellation Alert – Find out as soon as your flight is canceled. You can click the airline phone number on your mobile phone to be one of the first to speak to their customer service.

 
Gate/Terminal Change – Show up in the right place and get a jump on other travelers whenever your gate changes.

Arrival Update – Get published baggage claim info as you taxi to the gate. 

Connection Summary - Find out which gate your connecting flight leaves from and approximately how much time you have to make your connection.

Some airlines and websites offer mobile alerts to their passengers, but they usually only work when you book with them, and often require you to set up alerts every time you fly. With TripIt Pro, you automatically get mobile alerts for all the flights in your itinerary, no matter where you book or what airline you fly. Also, our flight information comes from many different sources, and often we can alert you to delays and/or cancellations before the airline and/or airport.

Just forward your travel confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com and you’re set!  

TripIt Pro for non-US travelers – hang on, it’s coming!

Since we launched TripIt Pro earlier this week, we’ve heard from many travelers outside the US who want to upgrade to TripIt Pro, and are understandably unhappy that they can’t. We wanted to take a minute to explain…

First of all, we want to make sure that our non-US travelers know that we value you just as much as we do our US-based travelers, and we know you travel a lot and would get a lot of utility out of TripIt Pro. It has always been our plan to offer TripIt Pro to you, and we’re really glad to hear that you want it. 

There are two main reasons that we aren’t currently able to offer TripIt Pro to travelers who do not have a US billing address and mobile number. 

1) Getting travel alerts delivered to non-US mobile numbers is a lot more complex.

2) There are additional steps we need to take before we are able to accept payment from people who live outside the US. 

When we launch TripIt Pro to non-US travelers, we plan to offer some form of a charter membership. We don’t know yet when this launch will happen, but we’ll let you know as soon as we do. 

Also, please note that for current subscribers, TripIt Pro does work globally today. We are already monitoring itineraries and flights throughout the world.

We’d like to thank our non-US members not just for your patience, but for your enthusiasm about TripIt Pro. We’re working on making it available to you soon!

Road Warriors, meet TripIt Pro

Today we announced TripIt Pro, our new premium service for frequent travelers. There’s a great write-up in TechCrunch and lots of fun chatter on Twitter too.

A small group of travelers have been using TripIt Pro for months and we’re excited to release it to the public. If you like TripIt, you’re going to love TripIt Pro! Consistent with our mission to make travel easier, TripIt Pro is made up of all new features—loyalty point tracking, flight monitoring, mobile alerts, alternate flight options and automated sharing—designed to address the most common requests from our busiest travelers. 

TripIt Pro is the first big step in making proactive use of the information our travelers are storing, and do more of the work behind the scenes, “automagically” if you will. Because TripIt understands when, where and with whom you are traveling, we have the information we need for TripIt Pro to monitor changes to trips, track point balances, issue mobile alerts, etc.

A few things that I’ve found most helpful about TripIt Pro …

• Check-In alerts come exactly 24 hours before flight time, so I was able to snag Group A on Southwest the other week
• A Gate Change alert helped me avoid missing a connection last month, and I helped a couple on my flight with all the Alternate Flight Options
• I finally have one place for all my frequent flyer info that shows me how close I am to elite across my accounts
• No more forgetting to share all my trips with my wife, she’s now in my Inner Circle and sees all my trip details automatically (definitely the most important feature :)

Some of these new TripIt Pro features are costly to provide, so we’re asking people to pay for Pro, making this our first premium service. We thought long and hard about this decision and have worked to deliver a high-quality service at a fair price that we believe will truly save frequent travelers some stress, time and money.

For our loyal users, we’re offering a 30-day free trial and a special charter member price of only $49 per year for Tripit Pro, a 50% discount on the standard price of $99 per year. If you sign-up by July 31, you’ll never pay more than $49 per year for TripIt Pro. You can sign-up at www.tripit.com/pro. 

Please note, the core TripIt service that you’ve come to know and love will continue to be free and will continue to improve. And to our users outside the US, we’re working hard to support text messaging and recurring billing to non-US accounts, so please standby for TripIt Pro support outside the US.

This release is also an important step forward in TripIt’s strategic evolution. In September 2007, TripIt opened to the public and made a big splash with our Itinerator email parsing technology that made it possible for travelers to create itineraries from their emails. In October 2008, we launched TripIt on the LinkedIn platform, one of many social sites and services we now integrate with. In January 2009, we released our open API that has opened up access for authorized third-parties to improve and create new services for TripIt travelers. Now in June 2009, we give you TripIt Pro.  Pro is just a little taste of many cool services we have planned in the future!

As always, we can’t wait to hear what you think. Keep sending all your feedback to feedback@tripit.com. Thanks!

- Gregg Brockway

TripIt doubles number of supported sites

If you've used TripIt, you know that the easiest way to get your travel plans into your itinerary is to forward your travel confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com. Every time we get an email with a new booking format, we train the TripIt Itinerator to properly read that email. So the more you send, the smarter the Itinerator gets.

 

Since the beginning of this year, we've more than doubled the number of sites that TripIt supports, from 300 sites to now over 600 sites...and growing. This includes nearly every airline in the world, all the large hotel chains and hotel booking networks, rental car sites, railways, cruise lines and travel agencies. It also includes hundreds of other sites, like event tickets, hostels, ground transportation, shuttles, restaurants, car shares and many more. We've also been adding hundreds of company-specific corporate travel booking formats. Most of the booking sites used by frequent travelers at companies around the world are now supported by TripIt.

 

See our Supported Sites page for a full list, and keep sending us all of your travel confirmation emails- we'll keep adding support!