TripIt Blog

TripIt.com Gets "iPadified" with New Map View

By Aaron Friedman, Product Manager at TripIt

We're always looking for new, smarter ways to organize all your travel plans in one place, and bring minute-by-minute details of your trip to your fingertips.

But we realize that sometimes the "where" matters more than the "when" - especially when you're in a new place.

Inspired by TripIt’s iPad app, the new itinerary map view let's you interact with your entire trip geographically. You can get the "lay of the land" and quickly create directions between your activities. 

To explore the itinerary map, open an upcoming trip on tripit.com and click the "Map" button.

PS - Did you know there are lots of cool, unique things you can only do on tripit.com? Here's a quick list:

• Total trip cost: see how much was spent on air, car and hotel reservations at-a-glance
• Weather: itineraries automatically include historical averages for each day of the trip
• Calendar sync: subscribe to a calendar feed of all trip plans or download one trip’s calendar file
• Group trip planning: add travelers to an itinerary with the ability to add or edit trip plans
• Social networks: share trip plans automatically on Facebook, LinkedIn, Salesforce Chatter and Yammer
• TripIt Groups: access a company calendar to see when and where colleagues are traveling

TripIt for Business: Bringing Office Travel into the 21st Century

When we created TripIt for Business, we took the same TripIt technology you’ve come to rely on for organizing all your plans in one place, and used it to make office travel easier for travelers, travel coordinators and colleagues.

For better or for worse, a lot of companies are still dealing with unnecessary headaches related to office travel. If the scene below feels all too familiar, you may want to pass this along to your boss.

Today, we’re going a step further by helping managers understand how much travel is on the books, and learn money-saving tips from the company’s road warriors. By accessing real-time spending data in TripIt for Business, you can quickly get answers about how much has been spent on travel this year, what travel spend will be in the next 30 or 90 days, and who the most frequent and efficient travelers are. 

And you get all this great data even if you don’t book all your travel in one place. Freedom to book where you want, plus the intelligence you need to run your business – that’s TripIt for Business.

Perhaps you or someone in your company treks to the same cities over and over? That’s a wealth of knowledge on how to get the most bang for your travel buck. Here are some of my money-saving tips:

Battle Hymn of a Frugal Business Traveler

• Keep calm and carry on: travel lighter to save a buck (bonus tip: volunteer to check for free at the gate if they need more room)
• Avoid hidden fees: hit the ATM before you get on the road, or in a cab
• Skip the taxi line: check to see if your hotel has an airport shuttle
• Built-in meals: look for business-friendly hotels that offer free continental breakfast (and a newspaper, to boot)
• Surf for free: many hotels and airports offer free wi-fi - $20 daily fees are so 2002

What are your business travel tips and tricks? Go to http://facebook.com/TripItforBusiness to participate in our Facebook poll.

Quite a Journey: Looking Back at 2011

It's been quite a year. Before 2012 kicks into full gear, we wanted to take a moment to look back and celebrate the most recent leg of our journey together...

Collectively, you've traveled more than 5 billion miles! That's more than double the miles logged last year. Thanks for taking us with you, and providing suggestions from the road. We love hearing from you - and we celebrate the victories you share @TripIt or on Facebook, whether it's dollars earned back on airfare with TripIt Pro, or when you get the last seat on an alternate flight. 

This year we welcomed fresh new faces to the TripIt team, and there's room for more (check out our open positions here). We even had our first Hack Day! And the team was very busy this year...

We launched the iPad and Windows Phone apps, gave the Android and iPhone apps design refreshes, and joined the Amazon app store and Kindle Fire in December. There's more to come in January, so all those recently unwrapped tablets will be able to download TripIt in no time.

In October, we announced an exciting partnership with Avis to make booking a rental car even easier in less clicks. We're also helping power the new Frommer's Remix by HP. Putting itinerary data to work for you is an idea that we'll continue to bring to life with the 1,200 developers now using our open platform.

Joining Concur in January opened the door for exciting new features and partnerships. In June, we made it easy for TripIt users to automatically create an itinerary any time they book travel through Concur, and for TripIt Pro itineraries to feed expense reports in Concur. Companies of all sizes now have endless options to organize travel and expenses, seamlessly.

TripIt for Business really started to take off this year with a convenient way to see who's in or out of the office - and it's about to get really interesting in early 2012. We also introduced trip sharing through Salesforce Chatter and Yammer, as another way to keep colleagues in the loop.

One of the biggest highlights of the year was winning our first Webby Award. We were delighted to be recognized among top innovators in tech, and also later within the travel industry, when we received honors from Travel Weekly's Magellan Awards and the Telegraph Travel Awards.

It really is an exciting time to be a traveler, and we can't wait to show you what we have up our sleeves for 2012. 

Cheers,

Gregg, Scott, Andy and the TripIt team

 

Share Trips with Colleagues in Chatter and Yammer

By Edith Harbaugh, Senior Product Manager

Traveling can be lonely. And finding out later that a colleague or friend was in your city and you didn't know can be even more frustrating. In Barcelona for a conference several years ago, I thought my jet lag was causing a hallucination, as I stumbled on my coworker Tam in the lobby. 

Part of the power of TripIt is not just organizing your trips, but letting friends and coworkers know when and where you're traveling (and vice versa). That's why we've added two more ways to share trips today, in Salesforce Chatter and Yammer. If you choose to do so, we'll let your colleagues know when you're planning a trip, about to leave, and returning - just like you can share with friends in Facebook. 

To mark the occasion, we're featured today at Yammer on Tour in San Francisco, along with collaborative services like Box and ZenDesk that are making it easier for coworkers to keep each other in the loop. 

Beyond Yammer and Chatter, here are some other easy ways to find out when and where colleagues are traveling:

• TripIt Groups is a free service for companies that makes it easy to view and share travel plans with colleagues all in one place - in a company calendar or map view. More than 25,000 companies use TripIt Groups, ranging from those in the Fortune 500 to small businesses.
• TripIt for Business is a simple solution for companies who want to take the pain out of traveling, planning, and organizing office travel.  Plus, TripIt for Business customers get premium calendar and group features including: a quick view of who’s in/out today; historical and future month access; and company sub-groups. TripIt for Business pricing starts at $29/month.

So, let your coworkers know where you are, and be a little less lonely on your next trip!

Introducing: Company Calendar

By Edith Harbaugh, Senior Product Manager

Is Brian out? Is Scott in today? When is Mike going to Redmond for training? Uh-oh, I didn't realize IYang was taking a week vacation this month!

TripIt is a small office; smaller than you might think given how much cool stuff we get done. However, even with 50 people, I often have no idea when my coworkers are in and out of the office.  

If someone's not at their desk, it could mean they're in a meeting, or at Coffee Bar - or at a meeting at Coffee Bar.  Or it could be that they're in Portland for a Java conference, in Yellowstone with family or otherwise "out". A very common travel problem is just knowing when and where people are.

To help offices get organized, today we announced a new company travel calendar. Now, the 25,000+ companies who already use TripIt Groups and the chrono-philes out there (you know who you are), can see when people are in and out. Don't worry, your group still only sees your trip location and dates, no details.   

TripIt’s company calendar will help you pinpoint those high traffic out-of-the-office days (hello, summer Fridays), and plan meetings if several people are visiting a remote location.  You might have an a-ha moment when you realize multiple people are in New York and you can have a spontaneous get-together. 

The TripIt calendar is completely free to you and your company. However, you can upgrade to TripIt for Business for more goodness: 

• Get a "today" quick view of who's in and out right now (and where they are)
• View travel in the coming months and see past travel on the company calendar
• Make multiple custom groups for your company, so each group only sees each other's travel. Or invite people outside of your company (like contractors or potential hires) to join your company group.  

To learn more about how company calendar works, click here.

 

The Amazing Hack - Summer 2011

We recently hosted our first two day hackathon, “The Amazing Hack” at TripIt HQ.  Fourteen teams made up with folks who came from every department of the company competed to build what ended up being some pretty amazing hacks - and clever ways of presenting them - spotlighting innovation across the organization.

As this was our first TripIt internal hackathon, I was a bit nervous as to what the results might be and how much people would get into it, and now that it’s over I must say that the TripIt team far surpassed any expectations I could have reasonably had!

When the judges assembled (including guest judge John Lilly - pictured above) for presentations at the end of the 36-hour rush, we were bombarded with creativity: guitar serenades, animations, illustrations - and there was even a human taxi with built-in GPS...

There were hacks that solved longstanding problems in the existing product. There were hacks that made bold suggestions about how to rip up and reinvent existing functionality. There were even hacks that suggested entirely new business models and revenue streams that TripIt could pursue.  

I’m so absolutely proud of the teams that participated as they clearly poured their heart and soul into the competition.

The next challenge for TripIt is to find out how to ship as much of this work as we can before we have our next hackathon.  We’re definitely having another one as I don’t get as much time to code as I used to and this is a very convenient excuse.  More about my hack in a future post (sneak peek below)!

But onto the winners. I’d like to congratulate the following folks for presenting revolutionary ideas that you will very likely see in the flesh:

Grand Prize Winners: Harold, Cliff and Lisa

 

    Third Place (Tie): Steven, Mike, Gina

 

Second Place: Thor 

Third Place (Tie): Alex and Yu....

 

Stay tuned for more posts about the innovation that came out of The Amazing Hack - Summer 2011. For now, check out out our Flickr album. 

 

Developer Do's & Dont's: How to Make Apps that Win Over Travelers

By Travis Winfrey, Mobile Development Manager

TripIt recently announced that we support over 330 customer and business-oriented apps. We thought it might be helpful to share a handful of tips that we've found useful in writing our own trio of applications, to help you use the TripIt API efficiently in your mobile client.

 

Do make your app as responsive and network-aware as possible. The faster your users can get their data, the happier they will be.  In addition, network efficiency turns into power efficiency, another customer-pleasing target.  As they say in the Android guidelines, "assume the network is slow" and remember the network performance on a physical device will always be worse than what you will have on an emulator.

• Do use /modified_since/timestamp.  Every response from our server is timestamped, e.g., 1259029173.  This opaque value can be resubmitted on your next request with /modified_since.   You will only get objects related to your request when they have changed since that timestamp. This tiny modification speeds up the updates to your client by a fantastic degree, as it will not have to process unchanged information.  If your client manages Trip data and Point Tracker (frequent flyer) data, then track those with separate timestamp values.  
• Do use JSON instead of XML with TripIt.  Many people turn to XML first, because there’s native support in many client libraries, and it’s the default format for the API.  Just add /format/json to your queries, though, and you will reap an immediate benefit of 30% smaller data on average.  There's no processing time difference, but your customers will pay a heavy price when that data comes to their phone over a slow network protocol like EDGE.  Travelers in general are going to deal with sketchier networks than a non-traveler.  There are dozens of public domain libraries for JSON.  It is easy to write either recursive-descent parsers or sequential access parsers similar to SAX using these libraries.
• Do request compressed data.  Our JSON-formatted data can compress down 80-90% with gzip.  Simply add "gzip" into the "Accept-Encoding" header on your outgoing requests.
• Do avoid multiple roundtrips.  When you have high ping times, which is frequently true for mobile users, you want to minimize the roundtrips made to our API servers, especially since your phone has to set up a full HTTPS session for each request.  If your client needs all the TripIt objects, then you can use "/list/trip/include_objects/true" as the base request.  This call returns all the trip, profile, and object level data in one go.
• Do consider using /exclude_types/weather -- weather objects are present for every day of a trip.  As I write, we provide only historically oriented weather data, which is not helpful to a mobile user who is currently on a trip.  If you're not using that data, don't request it.  Weather data can take up 20-40% of the trip + profile + object data in the response from our servers.
• Do add a meaningful user-agent to your requests.  We would prefer the format AppName/versionNumber.

Don't expect data in every field.  TripIt has a rich data model that covers all the information we regularly see in confirmations.   If our servers can extract information from a confirmation, we will happily stuff that data into the appropriate object.  However, the data is not always there.  Always refer to our XML schema, where we are very clear about what fields will and will not be present for any object.

How would this play out in practice?  Well, cruise and rail confirmations are notorious for being skimpy, without addresses or phone numbers.  If you assume that some data “must be there” when you display or combine them for display, then you risk crashes or displaying unfortunate values like “(null) 43” to your customers.  Even if it’s “logical” that one value should be present, we still might not have it available.  Your clients must be robust in the face of all possible omissions in the fields.

Don't expect data in any particular format.  Again, our servers extract information from confirmations, which contain an amazingly wide variety of formats.  

• Phone numbers might have a generally usable international phone number, e.g., +1-212-555-1212 or they might be in any of a number of regional phone formats.
• Addresses might be in a geo-locatable format, or they might not.  
• Any values with actual costs in them have values like “300” or “US$300” or “300 USD”.  It’s best not to prefix or suffix any cost value.

It's conceivable that TripIt may standardize these lower-level details in the future, as each one represents a tiny roadblock for a user who might not know how to navigate around the local conventions. 

Don't expect data in English.  We publish traveler data in UTF-8, and we have extremely large coverage in non-English sources of travel confirmations.  You should always be using appropriate character types and string functions for fully internationalized data.

 

Don’t expect times on your objects.  Obviously, exact times are crucial to a traveler’s working schedule -- but we don’t always have the data.  Hotels commonly do not put a check-in time on their confirmations, assuming the traveler knows that is is usually 3pm.  This occurs about 2% of the time for hotels, in fact.   Objects like Notes rarely have times, even when they contain restaurant reviews or notes for meetings.  

 

The sorting rule that we follow on the TripIt web site may be useful to copy:

1. Items with no dates are shown last. People will sometimes put no-date notes on a trip, typically reviews.
2. Items with dates but no times are shown first in that day. 
3. Hotel and car activities on the same day should be shown in the correct order when there is no time on the object.  Cars must be picked up before they can be dropped off, and you cannot check out before you check in.
4. Times are converted to one timezone before sorting.  Times we send down in the API will almost always have timezones.
5. Finally, trip objects are sorted with the time or start-time for each object as the primary key, and end-time as the secondary key.  

Do recognize Pro users.  TripIt is a freemium model, with many ad-viewing customers and many subscription-based customers.  From an API development perspective, the main thing a Pro user shows to your client is lots more data for trips and frequent traveler information.  

 

For example, consider an Air Segment, where instead of just the scheduled time for departure or arrival, a Pro user will also have the latest estimated times, plus the most recent gate & terminal information.

 

Here we’ve extracted what a free user might see in their data stream, and contrast it with what a pro user might see.  (This is a highly compressed view of the actual data.  Timezone information and other duplicate information has been omitted or combined, for space reasons):

 

         "StartDateTime": "2011-03-30 07:30:00",
         "EndDateTime":   "2011-03-30 11:00:00",

 

In contrast, the Pro user’s data stream will include these additional details, showing a badly delayed flight and more terminal and gate information.  Consider all the possibilities when using these values.   If you display layovers, for example, you should be using the estimated times, as they are the best known values for that flight.  

 

         "Status": {
           "last_modified": "1301508689",
           "flight_status": "401",
           "departure_terminal": "4",
           "departure_gate": "B25",
           "ScheduledDepartureDateTime": "2011-03-30 07:30:00",
           "EstimatedDepartureDateTime": "2011-03-30 08:45:00",
           "arrival_terminal": "I",
           "arrival_gate": "A8",
           "ScheduledArrivalDateTime":  "2011-03-30 11:00:00"
           "EstimatedArrivalDateTime":  "2011-03-30 12:10:00"
           },
         }

 

We can't be experts in all the areas covered by your many different current and future apps - I'm personally looking forward to apps that will let me visualize my trips in advance, right down to the friendly bartenders - but we do know how our users behave, and how to make the most efficient use of our API in a mobile setting.

 

Of course, this advice is only specific to our API.  Apple and Android have touched on general performance issues elsewhere.  In future articles, I will touch on less-obvious aspects of our API content and how our customers typically use our services to store their traveler data.

 

If you find this useful, please do share with other developers in your network.

For more information, please go to http://www.tripit.com/developer.  You can also join us in our developer forum. 

 

 

TripIt for iPad: No More Blur

By Hootan Mahallati, Mobile Product Manager for TripIt

You know what's not cool? Blurry iPad apps. You camp out on the sidewalk for eight days to buy an iPad, ecstatically search iTunes for a dedicated iPad version of your favorite iPhone app, and.....your world is shattered; all you see is the iPhone app in the middle of the big, black canvas. Yes, you can enlarge the app to full-screen, but then all you get is maddening blurriness. You turn red with rage, and all of a sudden, you wonder how you can go on.

As a few of you have reminded us with recent releases of the TripIt iPhone app, we've been guilty of having a blurry app. Well, we here at TripIt really do listen to what you say, and today we're delighted to present to you our brand new TripIt iPad app! 

Now before you call Mom and weep uncontrollably with joy as you deliver this historic bit of news, let's have a quick heart-to-heart: this is the first in a series of upcoming releases that will see our iPad app catch up with our other apps in terms of functionality. Rather than wait to give you the big kahuna later on in the year, we thought we'd get this first version in your hands and hear what you think as we prepare the enhancements. Before you know it, a new version will be available with several enhancements, and we plan on keeping them coming. Cool?

With that out of the way, let's talk about the shiny new app you can use right now.

When you start up the app, you'll see a mix of the familiar and the new. On the left-hand side, you'll find the trusty, logical list of your trips that you can quickly scan. Click within a trip though, and a glorious detail page with a crisp, new design greets you. Given the additional space afforded by the iPad, you can accomplish most of your tasks, like sharing your trip or launching directions to an address, with just a few clicks on the details page. 

But wait, there's more! What would a TripIt for iPad app be without huge maps? Cue the music: glance over to the top of the page and you'll see a "Maps" button. Go ahead, click it. What you'll see is a map displaying all of your trip plans with stylized pins that you can tap for a quick preview of specific points in your itinerary. While the default view zooms out just enough to show you your entire itinerary, you can swipe and pinch to pan across and zoom in for more detail.

Our iPad app is a universal binary, which is geek-speak for two birds, one stone. In practical terms, this means that if you already have v2.5 of our iPhone app installed on your iPhone and later sync your iPad with iTunes, each device will launch the app designed for it. The reverse is true as well. In summary, install TripIt once wherever you want and the rest is taken care of.

You can purchase the app for free, or if you're the type of person who fast forwards your DVR through commercials, we have an ad-free option for you too in the paid section.

We are all very excited about our first iPad app and hope that you are too. Thank you for your patience as we roll out lots more very soon. As always, please share the joy by tweeting, Facebook-ing, and sending telegrams to your friends. Of course, keep those comments coming!

Oh, and those of you who gave us four stars in iTunes and promised a fifth if we gave you an iPad app, we're watching! 

The TripIt Traveler Profile is live

You can now create a Traveler Profile on TripIt.  The immediate goal is to give TripIt travelers one place to track all their travel information and showcase their travel history.  The profile includes basic information about a traveler, including home location, upcoming trip destinations, connections in TripIt as well as important travel statistics like miles traveled, days on the road, etc.  

I’m particularly excited about the personal travel statistics.  Frequent travelers are generally fanatical when it comes to tracking their airline miles (or kilometers).  TripIt goes one better to track all distance traveled whether by air, car, boat or rail as well as other metrics to provide a comprehensive snapshot of the traveler.  To make it even more interesting, travelers can see how they rank among their network of connections. 

Beyond the immediate benefits of centralizing each traveler's information, the Profile helps our travelers share their information beyond TripIt with the people they want to know, whether TripIt members or not.  TripIt travelers can now turn on a public version of the Profile and use this as a permanent location on the web where friends, family and co-workers can learn more about their travel. 

Importantly, the information that is shared is always in the control of the traveler.  By visiting the Profile page, the traveler can easily decide how broadly to share each piece of the profile, whether within their network, within the broader TripIt community or with the world at large.  

We have also provided travelers with the ability to publish (and turn off) an Atom-based activity feed for use with third party applications.  This feed includes basic alerts like where I’m going, when I leave, when I get back, etc.  We’re already seeing travelers incorporate this into RSS readers, homepages and blog widgets. 

One day soon, we hope travelers will easily be able to incorporate these feeds into places like Plaxo's Pulse, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, FriendFeed, Xing, Bebo, Hi5, Orkut or wherever else they are social and want to share.

At TripIt, we’re not trying to create the next great social network.  Rather, TripIt is a social utility that helps people manage their travel plans and easily share travel information with the people they want to know.

As always, we look forward to hearing what you think.

- Gregg

New: TripIt Mobile

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of our new mobile interface, TripIt Mobile!  From virtually any mobile device, just go to http://m.tripit.com and you can quickly and easily access all your trip information.  Early reviews are very positive, and even I’ve been blown away by how useful the feature is now that I’m using it in the real world (I’m traveling right now and TripIt Mobile has already saved me twice!).

What makes TripIt’s mobile application so special?  You just navigate to a single site and you can get ALL your trip information.  Some airlines, hotels, and online travel sites have decent mobile interfaces, but you still have to navigate to each one separately to retrieve your info.  But as long as you are sending all your confirms to plans@tripit.com, you can get everything in one place.  Plus, we show you maps, directions, weather, closeness matches, alerts, and much more.

Part of being a great travel organizer is making it super easy to get your information in, but getting it out is just as important.  So we free up your travel information in several different ways:

• iCal feeds – TripIt keeps your calendar in synch by sending a live feed of your trip information right to Outlook, Google Calendar, and many others.
• Paper printouts – Sometimes low-tech just works better, so when you prefer to carry paper, TripIt’s consolidated printout of your entire itinerary can be a great option.
• TripIt To Me – You can just email a command like “get flight tomorrow” or “get trip today” to plans@tripit.com, and we’ll respond right away with your travel information by email.  This can be helpful when you only have access to email, but not a web browser, or if you want to store a copy of your plans on your mobile device without having to rely on getting a live cell signal.
• Activity Feeds -- You can add your TripIt activity feed to a homepage like MyYahoo, iGoogle, and others, and not even have to log into TripIt to see the interesting things happening in your account.  You'll know when a friend is about to leave on a trip, when they just got back, or when they start planning a new trip.  You can even get updates on changes to your trips and other goodies coming in the future.
• TripIt Mobile – As described above, this is similar to going to the TripIt website to get your information, but we’ve optimized the interface to make it quick and easy to use on your mobile phone.

If you haven’t tried TripIt Mobile yet, I really encourage you to check it out.  And if you are an iPhone user, I think you’ll really like the nifty display we’ve built specifically for you.  We hope you enjoy it, and as always, we look forward to your feedback!