TripIt is rocking with funding and more!

It’s already been a busy week at TripIt, with the launch of TripIt Groups and our Hotwire partnership. Today, we’re pleased to share with you that we have closed on a third round of funding, a whopping $7 million from the terrific people at Azure Capital Partners and O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures. We’re grateful for the support of these world class investors, and we’re looking forward to accelerating the development of great products that streamline the travel experience.

  

Fund raising is always an interesting time filled with questions like when, how much, from whom, etc. In the current tough economic climate, it is a particularly rigorous process that forces you to think hard about both past accomplishments and future goals.

Over the past year TripIt has been largely focused on projects to address the top requests from travelers. We love reading your blogs, tweets and Facebook posts. Your feedback is making TripIt better every day and we’re happy to deliver what you ask for—thank you! 

Here are some highlights from TripIt’s 2009…

• TripIt Pro - a completely new premium product for road warriors with flight alerts, alternate flight options and frequent traveler reward tracking.
• Free mobile apps for Android, BlackBerry and iPhone, so travelers have their full TripIt itinerary right on their mobile device.
• An open API platform and ecosystem that’s currently being used by nearly 400 developers and partner services, including Yapta, ExpenseBay, Go Airport Shuttle, RideCharge, Where I’ve Been and top mobile apps like FlightTrackPro and USA Today AutoPilot.
• More trip sharing options, such as linking your TripIt account to Facebook, Twitter, Lotus Notes and Plaxo, and the increasing popularity of the TripIt travel app on LinkedIn. And, with this week’s launch of Company Groups, we’re continuing to build on this front.
• Our Itinerator (that’s the heart of TripIt that automatically turns your travel confirmation emails into itineraries) has grown from supporting 300 booking sites in January 2009 to over 1,000 booking sites today, including many international airlines, hotels and travel services for our growing number of non-US travelers.
• Last, but not least, we’ve made countless usability improvements, including easier account and trip merging, solving common user problems, and taking many steps to simplify our user interface.

The media and blogosphere have been incredibly kind to us. Many respected journalists included TripIt on their “top” and “favorite” lists, including Matt Gross (New York Times Frugal Traveler) and Michael Arrington (TechCrunch). TripIt is the only travel site on Michael’s annual list of his favorite websites, and we’ve been there for three years running. Additionally, Tripit was selected for CNET’s WebWare 100 and TIME Magazine’s Top 50 Websites, discussed on NBC’s Today Show and even featured in Apple’s big iPhone advertising campaign last summer.

 

Looking forward, our strategy is simple- to continue to do right by our travelers. We strongly believe in the Traveler-Centric Future that I blogged about last fall. In brief, several powerful trends are converging, including the growth of mobile services, increasingly portable social graphs, and the sophisticated ways that a growing number of web services communicate with each other. This convergence has the potential to re-shape the travel landscape. We’re only just scratching the surface in regards to all the ways that free-flowing travel information can help improve travel for everyone involved- suppliers, companies, service providers and, most importantly, the traveler. 

 

With our new funding in place, I can’t wait to see what TripIt will be able to do by this time next year. In closing, I want to offer a sincere thank you from the entire TripIt team for all your support. Stay tuned for more to come!

Gregg Brockway

…oh, we finally dropped the “Beta” from our website too, but nobody noticed :)

Comments

[Michael]

Congrats, thats awesome. I use TripIt all the time. Glad to see the innovation continuing to roll out. Hopefully we'll be able to drill down into our travel stats soon and driving directions will be accounted in those numbers. Keep it up...

[Rocky]

Can you please, please handle overlapping trips, nested trips and placeholder trips better. This is incredibly maddening for us road warriors who keep a lot of overlapping plans.

Automatically merging trips creates a nightmare. And the inability to move segments
(vs. an entire flight reservation) makes this even worse.

About to give up on an otherwise great product because of this...

[房屋仲介]

please handle overlapping trips.

[Spicer]

Rock on! Well done on the funding and the superb application. I can now fire my secretary!! Well Done!

[Phil Thompson]

What a brilliant App, well done to all your team. I have passed the App details onto my company.

Any chance of a PC version so that an itinary can be printed and used for exspenses claim back.

[Angie Ryan]

Hi Phil,

Angie from TripIt here. You can print your itineraries from your PC- just go to tripit.com on your PC and log on to your account using our regular website.

Hope that helps!

[Nimish Mehta]

Love your app. I signed up for the "pro" version and it's great. It's good value for the money. BTW there are missing features in it (e.g. simple things like you should have the airline record locator stored as well because it comes in very handy when trying to print boarding passes and / or rebook flights. Right now, tripit just takes me to the airline site but I need to (typically) know my record locator or mileage program number to log in. If you passed that information in the URL, that would be very very cool. Likewise, when trying to rebook, it would be great if Tripit could provide a list of alternative flights, as suggestion). But overall your service is excellent - I'm a fan and plan to continue using it!

On a different but related note, I also run a startup (bootstrapped and profitable) and just wanted to say that I hope you aren't celebrating too much on raising capital. Raising capital typically means dilution and I am not sure that's always worth celebrating :-).

Best of luck in building out the service and don't give away too much to the VC's!

[Nimish Mehta]

Hi guys - one more question: any plans to integrate to expensify.com?

Thanks

[cathleen]

congrats!! your tool rocks!

[Judi]

Congratulations! I am glad to see a great company with a great app get the funding to grow! One thing I would like to see in TripIt Pro's Point Tracker section is to have the accounts separated by category, such as, airline, hotel, car, etc. That would make finding them easier. Love TripIt Pro !!

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