TripIt Blog

Android Takes Flight in 2011: Version 1.9 Now Available

Time to get the charger out, your smartphone has been busy! Today we announced that overall mobile usage has doubled - and Android usage in particular has tripled - in one year among TripIt users. 

Also, Android 1.9 is now available for download in the Marketplace. The design changes will help you find important trip information quickly. Other highlights:

• Links and phone numbers in your notes are now fully clickable, so you can quickly make a call, right from the app. 
• You now have more options to preserve memory when you're not running the app.
• TripIt Pro users can customize reward point expiration alerts.

 

“It’s exciting to watch mobile adoption take off this year, as innovation in the industry heats up,” said Gregg Brockway, Executive Vice President and General Manager of TripIt. “Each generation of smartphone provides even more opportunities for us to improve life on the road for travelers. The idea of a personal assistant in the palm of your hand – one that organizes important trip details, or sends helpful reminders and alerts – is becoming a reality.”

What do you think of the Android app's new look?

TripIt’s Android app has a fresh new face

Today, we unveiled a facelift for our Android app, designed to make it even easier for you to navigate between itineraries and connections, and view reward program points for TripIt Pro users. 

Don’t like ads? Also available is an ad-free version of the app for $3.99.

And for all the stats junkies, we also discovered some interesting things about those of you who use our Android app. Take a look at the trends below, and let us know your thoughts in the comments section.

Android Use Peaks Among Millennials

• A higher percentage of TripIt’s Android users are in their late twenties (25-29) and early thirties (30-34) than any other smartphone group.
• Among iPhone and BlackBerry users, the largest percentages are in their late thirties (35-39) and early forties (40-44).

On the Road Again? Not Necessarily

• TripIt’s Android users travel less frequently for business than other smartphone users.
  • 21 percent of Android users travel 15 or more times per year for business, compared to 36 percent of BlackBerry users and 23 percent of iPhone users.
• Android users take less leisure trips per year than iPhone users.
  • A higher percentage of Android users take 1-3 leisure trips per year than iPhone users; meanwhile, a higher percentage of iPhone users take four or more leisure trips per year than Android users.

Favorite Travel Apps

• Beyond TripIt, other popular travel apps for Android users are: Google Maps, Yelp and TripAdvisor.

What other apps do you use while traveling?

 

TripIt and Concur Make Expensing Travel Easier

I'm pleased to share we've reached the next mile marker in TripIt and Concur's journey together. As you may remember from previous posts in January and February, we’ve been hard at work integrating the best of both worlds to make life easier for travelers everywhere.

If your company is one of the thousands of global businesses using Concur to book travel (like Salesforce, Constellation Brands, or Cinemark), you may have noticed the option to connect TripIt to your Concur account. Creating an itinerary is even more automagical than before.

Today, we’re taking it a step further, making it possible for companies to automate Concur expense reports from TripIt Pro itineraries – no matter where you book. It’s one less step for you to get reimbursed, and helps fill the gaps for your employer, making expense reporting painless for everyone involved. Full details available here.

Also, companies who sign up for Concur Breeze can get all the benefits of TripIt Pro for their small business in one powerful package, including the ability to automate expense reports. The best part is that travelers can continue to book travel as they always have. Full details available here.

Both integrated solutions make the tedious process of expensing your travel a whole lot easier. And let’s be honest, we could all use a little extra time in our day. 

There's much more to come! Meanwhile, everyone can look forward to more TripIt mobile updates and new features – all designed to solve the problems you face as a traveler, so you don’t have to. 

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. 

 

 

Good Things Come in Threes: Meet the “Not Just a Plane” Winner

Thousands of you entered in our “Not Just a Plane" promotion by creating a trip with at least three booking confirmations. 

As you may remember, we launched this promotion to mark the 3,000+ booking sites now supported by TripIt, and to remind travelers to send us all the reservations from your trips, including restaurants, concerts, and more.  

Apparently, we were preaching to the choir! 66% of the total reservations forwarded to TripIt during the contest were “not just a plane” – led by hotels and car rentals.

So without further ado, congratulations to Sara of Prescott Valley, Arizona on being the proud winner of our “Not Just a Plane” promotion, and a $500 AMEX gift card. 

Here are a few words from our big winner:  

“I travel frequently for work and TripIt is a lifesaver!  Before a trip, I used to have to create an itinerary using Excel, which involved finding all my email reservations, and then, flipping back and forth between them and my spreadsheet.  I've been using TripIt for about a year and it has streamlined the process for me.  It is so easy to forward my email reservations and have TripIt put it all together for me in an itinerary.  It saves me so much time!  Also, I love the TripIt app for Android.  I no longer have to worry about printing out my reservations or directions, it's all available in the palm of my hand!" 

Sara, we hope you can put the $500 towards a relaxing leisure trip.

For everyone else, remember to forward all your reservations to plans@tripit.com. We can handle it!

 

NO PURCHASE OR PAYMENT OF ANY KIND IS NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN.

Promotion open only to residents of the 50 United States and District of Columbia who are at least 18 (or the age of majority in entrant's state of residence). Promotion starts 12:01 AM PT on 3/3/2011 and ends 11:59 PM PT on 4/13/2011. Winner will be selected by random drawing on 4/27/2011 and notified by phone and/or e-mail by 5/4/2011. One winner will receive one $500 American Express gift card. To enter, follow the directions in Section 7 of the Official Rules ("Rules") to enter online (via http://blog.tripit.com/2011/03/not-just-a-plane-promotion.html ) or by mail. Odds of winning depend on number of eligible entries received. Void where prohibited. Promotion subject to Rules, so see Rules for full details. Sponsor: TripIt, Inc., 500 Treat Ave., Suite 100, San Francisco, CA 94110.

 

The Webby Has Landed

By Gregg Brockway, General Manager and co-founder of TripIt

In a truly momentous week worldwide, I'm proud to report that today TripIt is celebrating a victory of our own: we won a Webby!  

The Webby Awards are the most prestigious honor an Internet company can achieve. It’s a tremendous compliment as it’s judged by people who know great design and usability: the members of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, which includes Martha Stewart, Arianna Huffington, Biz Stone, David Bowie, and Richard Branson, to name a few.

TripIt is in good company among a host of great winners in other categories - Foursquare, Flipboard, Yelp, Pandora, Evernote and many more.  In its 15th year, more than 10,000 Webby entries from 60 countries were judged.

Of course, when I shared the news with my kids, they only really got the significance when I mentioned Angry Birds won too.

And last but never least, we’d like to thank all of you for your support, loyalty and feedback, which has helped shape TripIt into what it is today. (Note: your extra help voting in the People’s Voice awards didn’t go unnoticed – and congratulations to Kayak.)

Now to condense this into five words… more on that soon.

Combined with our iPad release, today is one heck of a day! 

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! 

Reward the unsung travel hero in your office with a $500 SpaFinder Gift Certificate

 

To celebrate Administrative Professionals Week (April 25-29, 2011) in the United States, we’re giving you the chance to reward the unsung travel hero in your office.

You know the one we’re talking about. The one who books your travel arrangements; has the patience of a saint each time your plans change; gets you to the meeting on time. The one who has your back when flights are cancelled, drivers don’t show up or you can’t find the hotel. The one you always forget to thank enough.

Well here’s your chance to say thank you in a big way!

To nominate your unsung hero to win a $500 SpaFinder gift certificate as well as a one-year subscription to TripIt for Business, tell us about your hero in 100 words or less. Our judging panel, made up of TripIt for Business employees, will be looking for inspiration, originality, humor and irreverence.

How to enter:

1. Be a member of TripIt.com or visit www.tripit.com to register for free.
2. Tell us why your hero should be our hero in 100 words or less by posting a comment to this blog post.

Prize Details: 

Five finalists will receive a one-year subscription to TripIt for Business valued at $348. One grand-prize winner selected from the five finalists will also receive a $500 SpaFinder gift certificate.

Start and end dates:

You have from April 13 – April 22, 2011 to nominate your office hero.

To see more details: Read full contest rules.

Good luck!

 

TripIt for Business, a new product for small and medium-sized businesses, is the smartest way to plan and organize office travel. It allows travel coordinators to create itineraries for travelers in an instant, organize all travelers on a convenient dashboard and easily keep travelers in the know and on the go.

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Promotion open only to residents of the 50 United States and District of Columbia who are at least 18 (or the age of majority in entrant's state of residence). Promotion starts 12:01 AM PT on 4/13/2011 and ends 11:59 PM PT on 4/22/2011. To enter, follow the directions in Section 7 of the Official Rules ("Rules") to submit your online entry message (100 words or less) about your unsung travel hero. Grand Prize: (1 winner): one $500 SpaFinder gift certificate. Finalist Prizes (5 winners): 12-month subscription to online "TripIt for Business" service for each winner's current place of employment (approx. retail value: $348 per subscription).  Winners will be selected by a panel of judges comprised of Concur Technologies employees. Entries will be judged on the following criteria: the most apt, original, and interesting entry message; the most inspirational entry message in relation to the unsung travel hero theme. Odds of winning depend on number and quality of eligible entries received. Void where prohibited. Promotion subject to Rules, so see Rules for full details. Sponsor: Concur Technologies, Inc., 500 Treat Ave., Suite 100, San Francisco, CA 94110.

 

 

How Many Third Party Apps Have You Synced with TripIt?

It’s been a busy couple of months here at TripIt, and we don’t just mean in our office.  We now have more than 850 developers and development companies building apps that sync with TripIt!

Each of these apps offers a little something extra for your next trip, from personalized news and travel recommendations, to alerts that will tell you when someone you know is at the airport.

Below, we have compiled a list of some of the latest apps to sync with TripIt, and as always, you can browse a longer list of third party apps on our Apps page. New apps are being added all the time, so we encourage you to check out the Apps page every so often.  

Better yet, if you are a developer and have a great idea for a product that solves a travel problem, why not build your own app today?

 Airside Express

Never fumble at security or the gate again--put your mobile boarding pass on your smartphone!

To get started, download the Airside Express App, import your trips directly from TripIt inside the app, then automatically retrieve and store your boarding pass on your phone. 

Airside Express currently works with the following airlines:  American Airlines, United Airlines, Continental Airlines, Alaska Airlines, and Delta Air Lines.

Planely

See who else Is flying with you. This service is particularly popular for people going to conferences. You can sync Planely with TripIt a single time, then you will receive an alert whenever someone else on the service is on your flight or in your airport.  

To get started, create your free Planely account, then sync with TripIt from the settings page.

Tripline

Easily make shareable, animated trips with photos, music, links, and stories.  Once you connect your Tripline account with TripIt, you can import your Triplit trips into Tripline, which will automatically create a travel map for this trip, equipped with travel dates and places. It’s a great way to share your trips with friends, or relive them later.

To get started, create your free Tripline account, then connect your TripIt account on their settings page.

Memolane

Display your past trips on a beautiful social timeline that also shows your activity on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and other social services. Travel is a key part of life, and Memolane has done a great job of tying it in with the rest of your perhaps less exotic lifestream.

To get started, create your free Memolane account, then connect your TripIt account by going to their services page.

TripCarbon

Automatically calculate your Carbon offsets when traveling.  TripCarbon pulls in your flight, hotel, and car rental details, and then uses some nifty calculations to calculate your combined Carbon offset total, and then sends this information back into your itinerary automatically. For the stats junkie in all of us, you can also view how they made their calculations.  I’m using it on a trip to Greece and feeling a little guilty. I think I’ll go plant a tree – or seven.

To get started, visit TripCarbon.com.

FlexTrip

Broadcast your travel plans and automatically retrieve travel deals and things to do when you’re traveling. Flextrip accesses a database of local deals and connects these offers with your upcoming destinations.

To get started, create your account at flextrip.com, then connect your TripIt account to FlexTrip on their trips page.

News360 (iPad App)

 Aggregate thousands of news sources for coverage from all points of view, and then get personalized news recommendations based on your future destinations.

To get started, download the app from iTunes, then sync with TripIt by holding your iPad vertically and then going to the Settings link.

To view press release: TripIt’s Open Platform Now Powers 330+ Travel Related Applications

 

TripIt for iPhone's Bêtes Noires

We need to confess something.

There are three things about TripIt's iPhone app that we’ve always hated.  And it’s likely you’ve hated them too.

Allow me to vent for a moment.

It drives me nuts that I can't edit my plans from the phone. It's a hassle when my plans change at the airport and I can't update myTripIt app with my new flight info (and then I keep getting timely, awesome TripIt Pro alerts about my now irrelevant old flight info). Ugh. Yes, TripIt's magic is converting your travel confirmation emails to itineraries through plans@tripit.com or Auto Import, but who are we to tell you what you can and can't do after that?

Second, when TripIt's itinerator detects conflicting plan information (like when my airline tweaks my flight's schedule, emails me about it and it gets picked up by Auto Import), it dutifully shows the conflicting plans in TripIt's iPhone app. (Which flight info is correct!? Gahh!) To resolve the conflict, I have to go to a Web browser. Fail.

Third, I hate the way I have to sign in to TripIt for iPhone. I go from the app, to m.tripit.com in Safari and then back to the app: it's a pain. If I fat-finger my password, it gets ugly, quick.

Well, with iPhone 2.4 we let our haters be our motivators (even when the haters are in our own office!). With this new update -- which you should get now in the App Store -- you can edit your plans in the app, pick the right flight among updates in the app, and there's a shiny new sign in experience that doesn't bounce you to the Web or do anything weird. It all just works. There is still a long list of things that we think can be a lot better about our app, but this new version is a big deal and, I think, makes life a lot better.

Thank you to all of you who are using TripIt and sharing your feedback with us. It makes all the time we spend building TripIt worthwhile.