TripIt is one of those great services that actually manages to make life easier — just submit your travel confirmation Emails, and the site generates a comprehensive itinerary. It’s made Michael’s list of products he can’t live without for two years running, and is quickly gaining fans among frequent travelers. That’s all well and good, but until now the service hasn’t really had much of a revenue model beyond advertising. Today, that changes: the company is launching TripIt Pro, a collection of premium features that is sure to appeal to a wide range of road warriors.
The first major feature offered by TripIt Pro is enhanced flight monitoring. TripIt will keep tabs on any delays, cancellations, and gate changes for every flight in your itinerary, and send you an SMS message to alert you as soon as there’s a change (you can also choose to receive reminders for check-in 24 hours before your flight). TripIt co-founder Scott Hintz ackowledges that some airlines offer similar notification services, but says that you have to set these up for every carrier you fly on. With TripIt, you only have to sign up once for it to work across all airlines.
The service can also recognize when a delayed flight you’re on may cause you to miss a connecting flight, and alerts you to any alternative flights leaving from the same airport (TripIt also knows how many seats are available on each flight, so it won’t suggest any full ones). Of course, you’ll have to still go through your airline’s booking agent and ask to be placed on one of these flights, but Hintz says that generally if you can ask for a specific flight with available seats, these agents are more likely to help you out.
Another new feature is the ‘Inner Circle’, which streamlines the service’s sharing functionality. Before now you’ve been able to share an itinerary with friends, but there hasn’t been a way to designate someone as a permanent buddy who can always see your plans (Hintz says users often wind up having to re-share plans with spouses and close friends for every trip they take). With Inner Circle, you’ll be able to grant permanent access to a select group of friends.
Finally, TripIt is adding a new point tracking service for your frequent traveller points. The service keeps tabs on airlines, hotels, and some car companies, presenting your points in a single interface. TripIt isn’t the first service to do this, but Hintz says it’s been one of the site’s top three most requested features.
TripIt Pro is going to cost $99 per year, but the site is offering a special introductory rate of $49/year for anyone who signs up by July 31st. And if you sign up at the cheaper rate, the site will offer the cheaper $49/year renewals for life. Frequent travelers are always looking for a way to take the burden out of flying, and now that they’ll no longer be able to pay $199 to skip airport security lines, this might prove a good alternative for reducing those headaches.
This is cool. I want them to put Google Wave-like finctionality on it to collaborate on trip logistics.
I always liked Tripit and I like the new sharing ability.
Sounds pretty good. I just hit the link on here for tripit.com and it says “site is currently down for maintenance”. Kind of an ouch moment.
They’ll be back up in the next 10 minutes or so.
and…they are down
the best gets better! I hope they do a push notice from the iPhone app in addition to txt alerts …
Tripit is a model for every web service startup.
Only if you live in the US.
I’ve used and supported TripIt for almost two years, back in beta, and this lack of non-US service is not a model for every startup.
I doubt anybody will use trip it anymore once http://gliider.com is fully out
Ummm.. they are different ideas. Do you actually know what you’re talking about?
I love TripIt but don’t travel enough to warrant paying them for it. Good luck to them though – great service.
Shocking. They won’t take my money as my billing address is outside the US (I’m in the UK). How hard would it have been to hook up with something like PayPal in order to facilitate the rest of the world?
I do hope they extend their introductory offer to the rest of us.
For $99/yr I want real time award and upgrade inventory with alerting for my flight, not just a listing of the points I have, which only changes monthly and something I already know. There are services that cost $99/yr that give you access to a slew of live flight data, much better value
I just signed up for the Pro version.
Does anyone know how long an account sync takes? I just see it spinning with a “We’re updating your account activity.
This may take a few minutes.”
I’m wondering if few is 1-10, 30, 60 minutes?
If anyone wants to test this out I am qthrul there as well
http://www.trip...m/people/qthrul
Nevermind… it looks like about 5-10 minutes per travel program you wish to track.
Holy crap. I have this complicated trip to Europe coming up for 2 weeks. I was manually doing what Trip It does on Google docs.
Trip It does it better, and provides more info and functionality (although didn’t get all the emails translated).
Wow. Just wow. Great service
http://www.traderbots.com
This is my favorite kind of comment.
I’m signing up for Pro right now.. love it.. the ability to just forward my receipts after purchases to plans@tripit.com and it builds my itinerary is awesome. I wish they had realtime weather thru accuweather.com rather than just almanac weather,. But the alerts for late flights without having to think about it is perfect.
and have the ability to buy a “bad weather hedge” in case it rains on your SF vacation or snows on your Spring Training excursion
Very irritating! I use Tripit the entire time and it’s most definately on my list of things I can’t live without. But I’m in the UK and had already entered my CC details before it threw me out! Come on guys – there is life outside the US!
I am doing whatever Peter Pham does.
I love TripIt. It made planning a 3-week European trip across 4 countries very easy, including managing our planes, hotels, sights, and trains.
Unbelievable that it’s available only in the US. I’ve been using TripIt for almost two years and it’s great. But they can’t process payments or create ‘pro’ accounts without a US address? What a joke.
For a business proposition that is based upon global travelers, this US-only limitation makes a mockery of what TripIt should and could be.
Will rethink my long-time use of TripIt. I live in unworthy Europe.
I like TripIt, however I miss the option to write my trip report – attach some pictures, videos etc. from my trip – I travel a lot and love to share my experiences.
Ideally, would love to see some sort of combination TripIt with http://www.ontheroad.to or in action here – http://courtyu....coast-to-coast/
TripIt is great to store my itinerary but not so good for documenting the trip in a trip blog.
Go tripit ! Great site.
It sounds like they signed up with FlightStats and are providing it at a premium. Is this anything more then that?
TripIt is immature company. Its look like plaxo in the early days!
They did just send an invitation email to all of my contacts!!!
Um, I would like to suggest that it was *you* that sent an email invitation to all your contacts. TripIt does allow users to do that, but it can’t do it by itself.
TripIt.com is totally immature in term of social networking. They did send invitation email to all my contacts!
Pro?! Their social feature is more of Amateur quality! It SCAM like plaxo in the early days!
This service do scam: http://www.gett...-spam-tripitcom
I try to pull up the email using their link and it bounces me off my browser every time. Hardly a great beginning.