Hi everyone, this is Scott Hintz, co-founder and VP of product here at TripIt. As head of product, my team is responsible for defining the next features we want to introduce to the site and coordinating their development. We’ve had such an overwhelming response from our users over the past two weeks, and first and foremost, I want to say thanks. Most of you heard about TripIt only recently as part of our inclusion in the TechCrunch 40 conference, but you’ve already become quite engaged with our product. One clear indication of your engagement is the wonderful feedback you’ve sent us. And lots of it!
The main point of this post is to acknowledge the feedback you’ve submitted and to make sure you know that we hear you, loud and clear. It’s been a challenge to keep up with all the email you’ve sent us, but I think we’ve managed to get back to most of you within 24 hours. I want to extend a big public thanks to our product manager Andrea Perez, who deserves much of the credit for that.
Now, the really hard part. You’ve sent us so many great ideas, but there’s no way we can do all of them right now. So prioritization has become the word of the day around here (although that never really changes), as we have to make some tough calls about which enhancements we spend our precious development resources on in the near term. Unfortunately, that sometimes means your personal favorite request doesn’t make the cut, but I hope you won’t take it personally. We love you all.
The good news is that most of your feedback so far can generally be summarized as “I love what you’re doing, TripIt is incredibly useful, I’ve been waiting for something like this for a long time, and my trips are going to be a lot better now that I have TripIt on my side.” But you want more, and I can’t blame you. So, what are the top requests we’ve received? Here are some of the major themes:
· Support rail/train travel – we‘ve been pleasantly surprised by the huge amount of our traffic coming from Europe, in particular, where rail is an important mode of transit.
· Detailed calendar synch – you like seeing upcoming destinations for yourself and your friends via our iCal feeds, but you want to also get detailed trip items like flights and hotels in that feed. We’ve also had many requests for Outlook support.
· International formats – our non-U.S. users are asking us to show temperatures in Celcius and dates in dd/mm format. You want us to show travel company phone numbers relevant to the country in which you live. And you’d like us to handle non-English characters better (apologies to the Bjørns and Günthers out there, whose names we have mangled!).
· Restaurants – perhaps the most common thing you do once you arrive at your destination is eat, so we should be able to capture restaurant plans that you’ve made.
· Account merge – many of you have accidentally created multiple TripIt accounts as you’ve forwarded us bookings from your work and personal email addresses, so you want to merge them back together.
· More booking sites – this one will never go away, but I have to mention that we get a constant flow of booking confirmations from sites we don’t yet support. Our team is constantly adding support for new sites, so keep checking back as we are adding new ones all the time. Andy, Jacques, Tim, and team haven’t been getting much sleep lately as they work tirelessly to support everything you are sending us (thanks guys!).
There are many others, but those are the biggies. Some of these are easier to build than others, but we’re doing our best to address these requests as quickly as possible. Thanks for your patience as we work furiously to get through this list, as well as plenty of other goodies we have in store for you.
Oh, and please keep the feedback coming – just email feedback [at] tripit.com. As I hope this note makes clear, we are listening, and we value it immensely.
Scott
