Do we really need another online travel startup? Gregg Brockway, one of the co-founders of online travel site Hotwire.com (EXPE), thinks so. His latest venture, TripIt, launched today. Aimed at the growing number of travelers who are buying flights, hotel rooms and car rentals directly from supplier sites, TripIt allows them to organize all of these individually booked arrangements in one place.
The company enters a crowded space. TripHub.com, for example, similarly allows users to collate their travel plans. But TripIt’s unique twist is that it lets users forward the confirmation e-mails from their bookings to TripIt, which then takes the pertinent information, such as flight number, date and time, and automatically inputs it the user’s travel profile. Also, the site uses the provided travel information to offer related info that could be helpful for the trip, such as weather and local maps.
TripIt isn’t selling flights or hotel rooms, but rather the company expects to make money through advertising and lead generation for online travel merchants. TripAdvisor.com has a similar revenue model. So do more established players such as Mobissimo.
Backed by $1 million in Series A funding from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures raised last April, we’re not sure the TripIt business plan will fly, pardon the pun. Coming from the online travel industry might give Brockway an edge over competitors when pitching his site to potential advertisers, but will that edge be enough?
It’s an attractive market to get a piece of, that’s for sure. The U.S. online travel market will grow to $128 billion in 2011 from $85 billion in 2006, according to Jupiter Research. The research firm also notes a growth in online travel spend directly on supplier sites.
“The online travel market will grow to $128 billion in 2011 from $85 billion in 2006, according to Jupiter Research” — That’s US only and probably the most conservative forecast I’ve seen for quite some time.
Do we really need TripIt? It’s not going to hurt. The online travel innovation cycle needs to be sped waaay up. The more in this space, the better for everyone.
The problem isn’t that there are too many ‘travel start-ups’…it’s that too many of them do the same thing. The creative ones pushing in new directions will survive…
One thing that is not particularly clear to me is the way the information is processed through the “TripIt Itinerator”" — is it processed manually from the email?
I would like to know more about that part as it is fuzzy there and they don’t really explain more about it. My usage of it will depend on the answer to the above. If it is processed manually (or even automatically), what are the chances of mistakes. If I am going to be fully dependent on this services, I want the guarantee that there won’t be a typo, screw up or adding an extra digit or so. Will they take responsibility on that part for missing a flight or important business appointment because of a wrong itinerary?
Until I hear that they have 100% accountability on mistakes made, I will not use it as there will always be that fear. Confirmation numbers won’t prove anything as a third part provider (Tripit) has reprocessed the information. Plus, if the itinerary is wrong, what if you left the originals at home or (worse case scenario) threw it away and you have no access to the web to check?
I wish that was asked at Techcrunch40.
I think the general public realise that these types of company are brokers or middle-men and therefore are less trusting of them. Can’t the backers of these start-ups find a new innovative bandwagon to jump on?
We actually used TripIt beta for a group of friends’ weekend trip and found it worked great for us. Especially when remembering potential noted spots people wanted to go to. We could just go on iphone and grab the itinerary, location, phone number, map of the place…and go. Did more dreaming up cool stuff we could potentially visit and making notes in TripIt we could all see, than wasting time during the vacation trying to rally everyone together.
I have to say that if you do have a group of folks dispersed across the country (or globe) and you want to not deal with 8-9 phone calls/emails this tool works pretty well,
will people use it extensively? that’s the beauty of this site, it does not rely on traditional social networking limitations of needing a huge critical mas sof users, it is useful right away; so I’d say it has a pretty good chance of success.
Now, almost one year later … when I have to anser the question: Yes, we need TripIt. It is a great tool (and no, I am not working for TripIt)!