TripIt Blog

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!

New Alerts and Activity Feeds

One of the benefits of putting all your travel plans into TripIt, plus connecting to other TripIt users, is that we can keep you posted on lots of interesting things happening in your travel world.  But, until now, we didn’t do a very good job of making that news easy to find or digest. 

But that’s all changed with our new alerts and activity feeds.  We’ve trimmed down the news updates TripIt generates to the stuff you really want to know, and we’ve placed it all on a new “Alerts” page within the My Trips tab.  Even better, you can now stream that news feed right to your favorite aggregator, such as MyYahoo, iGoogle, Outlook, or any other RSS/Atom reader.

So what kind of information is included in the feed?  Without having to log into TripIt, you’ll know when…

• One of your Connections started planning a new trip, just returned from a trip, or is about to leave on a trip
• A collaborator posted comments or made changes to your shared trip
• Someone in your network made a new Connection
• Someone sent you a Connection invitation
• You and one of your Connections will be close to each other while on the road (coming soon)

Since we launched the My Alerts feed a few days ago, I’ve loved loading MyYahoo every morning and immediately seeing interesting updates from TripIt.  I hope you will too!

International Date Formats…finally

In our latest release we addressed one of the top user requests, giving TripIt travelers the option to view dates in a format other than the U.S.-centric mm/dd/yyyy.  While we can’t defend the U.S. decision to be different, we thank our many non-U.S. travelers for their patience and hope they will enjoy TripIt with the date format of their choice.

Here are some additional international viewing options available in TripIt:

• Time on either a 12 or a 24 hour clock.

• Distance in either miles or kilometers

• Temperature in either Celsius or Fahrenheit.

All of the above settings can be changed from the My Account page.

-Scott

hCalendar Microformats and TripIt

As many of you have commented, it’s super that travelers can build and share their travel plans via the www.tripit.com website, but there is also a need to re-publish this information in other formats so that your travel information is available in the applications you like to use.  We took another step in this direction over the weekend by adding hCalendar microformat markup to all of the TripIt itinerary pages.

hCalendar microformat is a small chunk of HTML code that we put on the itinerary page so that a microformat-enabled browser can automatically extract information (e.g., calendar events, a geographic location, or a person's contact information) right off the page and use that information with other applications on your computer (e.g., your calendar application).

With hCalendar microformat on every TripIt itinerary, you just need a microformat-enabled reader and you can automatically copy your TripIt itinerary to your desktop calendar and then sync that information to your mobile device or another application.

While most of you probably don't yet have a microformat reader on your desktop, they are freely available for most operating systems and for most web browsers (unfortunately, not Internet Explorer yet). See here for more information on microformats and where to find a microformat reader.

This can be a useful work-around for those of you that use a personal calendar (e.g., Outlook 2003) that doesn’t support the iCalendar standard.  Microformats won’t continually sync your latest itinerary to your calendar, but at least you can get your trip data into your calendar or mobile device.

Here's an example of what this process looks like while using Firefox on Windows with the Operator microformat-reader plug-in and Outlook 2003.  The first screen shows me selecting my flight from San Francisco to Chicago.  The second screen shows me about to save that flight into my Outlook calendar.  So simple!

Please post any comments or questions or contact us at support@tripit.com.

-- Andy

New Closeness Alerts

How many times have you come home from a trip, say to New York, only to find that a friend of yours was also in New York and you didn’t know it?  Or maybe you had a quick business trip to Omaha and forgot that your old friend Steve lives in the area?  It probably would have been more fun to meet him for a drink rather than sit in your hotel room alone.  Enter TripIt’s new “Closeness Alert” feature.

Closeness Alerts tell you when you’ll be close enough to a friend or colleague so you could meet up with them. Best of all, you don’t have to do any additional work to enjoy the benefits of Closeness Alerts. Just keep forwarding your travel plans to plans@tripit.com, and be sure you’ve connected to all your friends, colleagues, and family members in TripIt – we’ll do the rest.

Here’s how it works. TripIt knows when you’re at home, or when you’re on the road. And when you’re traveling, we know all the various places you’ll be: your hotel, business meetings, restaurants – any plans in your TripIt itinerary that have valid addresses.  TripIt also has the same information for your friends who also use TripIt, so we can tell you when you’ll be close to each other. Say you have a business trip to San Francisco, including a lunch down in Palo Alto (about 30 miles south of San Francisco). If a friend of yours from Chicago is also in the Bay Area on business, say having a meeting in San Mateo (about 13 miles north of Palo Alto), then TripIt will alert both of you. It’s up to you whether you reach out to the friend to meet up, but at least you’ll know you have the opportunity.

We’ve really tried to make this feature effortless for our users.  It’s so easy to add detailed travel plans to TripIt – just forward us that OpenTable restaurant reservation, or your hotel confirmation from any of our 100+ supported booking sites, etc.  We’ll keep track of all the various places you’ll be on a trip without you having to manually enter anything.  Then we use that data to look for overlaps with your friends.  If you’ll be within 20 miles of a friend at any particular point on our trip, we let you know. 

You can try it out right now, and I’d love to hear what you think. Just visit TripIt and check out the Who’s Close tab to play around with the feature. As always, we love hearing what you think about TripIt, but especially for new features that we release. So please post your comments here or email us at feedback@tripit.com so we know how we can make TripIt even more useful for you in the future. Enjoy!

Scott