TripIt/Concur Sessions - talking the TripIt acquistion with Concur's Michael Eberhardt

On Jan 13 this year it was announced that travel and expense management company Concur (Nasdaq: CNQR) would pay up to $120 million for the indispensable travel tool Tripit (Kevin May Tnooz story here and press release here). I had a chance to speak last week with Michael Eberhard, Concur's EVP and GM Asia Pacific (pictured) about Concur, the deal and their combined plans for Asia. Three themes from the discussion

1. Asia is a big priority for Concur and TripIt. They are planning to spend a lot of time and money targeting customers in this region;

2. There will be stronger links to travel booking in TripIt. Concur are a large travel management company and are looking to bring that to TripIt; and

3. The social media parts of TripIt are here to stay. I expressed some doubts about the usage of the social media features but Concur remain convinced that these are important features that will be worked on and pushed.

Full interview notes below.

The BOOT Asks: What are your plans for TripIt post acquisition?

Eberhard: The main goals of the acquisition was to increase investment into all of the TripIt solutions (free, pro product and core business product). Helps [Concur further target] unmanaged biz travel especially those still craving data at deeper level than an itinerary.

The BOOT Asks: I use TripIt extensively for travel planning and co-ordination, but I have not found the social media parts (finding who is in what location) that useful or result in any connections while on a trip. Do you see value in the social media elements of TripIt?

Eberhard: We see the social media parts as important. Personally, prior to the acquisition I made a connections with friends, including one running a marathon in Asia. Combined with mobile and groups will give friends, family and travel managers information and visibility they have not had before.

The BOOT Asks: What are your non-English and Asian plans?

Eberhard: Concur had a lot a success across Asia with existing customers. We are now moving into AsiaPacific to acquire and service customers locally. We will increase staff in Hong Kong and Singapore and through our joint venture in Japan.

The BOOT Asks: Why did you launch a joint venture in Japan and what is the biggest thing about the Japanese market that surprised you?

Eberhard: some of our largest customers have travellers and employees using Concur inside Japan but we have not been acquiring new customers. To address this properly it made sense to do a JV with a local company (press release here).

The number one surprise about the Japanese travel market is that the market is more fragmented than we expected and processes are unique.

The BOOT Asks: Concur is (in part) in the expense management business. What is the weirdest expense you have seen an employee try to charge?

Eberhard: Most companies have some level of fraud. We have examples of lavish parties, including weddings being charged by employees.

My Take

I use TripIt religiously to help me cover 200,000 miles a year in travel. It is always a challenge to see how a start up will fare inside a multi-billion dollar company. Concur seems like a better home for TripIt than a media company or OTA due to the focus on travel and expense management rather than a retail or media model. As I tweeted when the deal was announced - this the first deal of 2011. Is also the first of my list of seven do-overs/reboots (Triporati, Tripit, NewTravelCo/Travelpost, Getaroom, Voyij, Wego and Hotelscombined) to get bought out.

Concur background

I have to admit upfront that I had not heard of Concur prior to this deal. If you are like me in this regard, let me share with you some of the background provided by Eberhard. At the core the company is a "provider of travel and expense management solutions". Market cap is around $2.7b (as of today). They claim 15 million users in 90 countries including big companies like Unisys, Ericsson, JCPenny and Cable & Wireless.

Tnooz: Four types of non-destination based search and what it means for online travel

Just live over at Tnooz.com is a post by me titled "Four types of non-destination based search and what it means for online travel". In it I look into the new approaches to online travel search and boo king coming from a variety of start ups including Gliider, Joobili, Triporati, TripIt, Traxo, Jetsetter, BonVoyou and many more. From the post and interesting discussion has started in the comments on the future of search. Check it out here

Tnooz: 7 companies from the "old guard"

My latest post on Tnooz is live. Title "Online travel reboots – Seven companies from bosses coming back for more glory".

I go through seven new companies formed by the online travel old guard including Triporati, NewTravelCo, Tripit, Hotelscombined, Wego, Getaroom and Voyij

TripIt launches TripIt Pro - more features and a price tag (Re-Posting)

Assuming I have not screwed up the embargo timing, (I did break the embardo - Update Below)

Travel co-ordination and itinerary builder TripIt is announcing right about now that it will be launching TripIt Pro. This will be a paid upgrade to the basic TripIt Product. We don't normally do launches here at the BOOT but I am a keen TripIt user, am interested by the potential for an online travel content/organisation company actually charging users for a product and TripIt's VP of Biz Dev Scott Hintz shared some product launch learnings that I wanted to pass on to you (oh....OK...and by way to disclosure they let me have access to a Pro Account for no charge).

Quick reminder - the core of the TripIt product is to let you forward to them all of your separate itineraries for each of the parts of the trip and they combine it into one itinerary that can be shared with others. My recent review of the base/free product is here. Most of features of the base product are "pre-trip". The paid TripIt Pro product comes with lots more during and post trip features such as flight tracking, mobile alerts and alternative flights to help with delays and missed connections and a points tracker/combiner for all loyalty cards. You can read up more on the features here. All useful stuff, will report back once I get a chance to trial them.

Hintz tells me the pricing will $100 per year, or $49 if you sign before 31 July. You may have heard this described as the "Freemium" model - where the base but usable produce is available free but advanced features cost. We have seen this in lots of desktop software but I have not seen it yet in a travel product. Hintz says they have done lots of research to set the pricing.

I wonder if there is an irrationality factor to get over when it comes to paying for online travel tools. The OTAs are busily cutting fees, travel inspiration and meta-search providers are looking for suppliers and agents to pay and Google is the most useful thing the world but it is entirely free to use.

That said for a multi-mile road warrior $100 per year is a rounding error on a travel budget. I certainly will certainly spend more each year just on the tips at cafes buying coffee and can easily burn that it one trip using my cell to dial into a conference call.

Unfortunately they can only take US credit cards. Hintz said there were practical and cost reasons for that but in hindsight wishes and with the product on the cusp of launch wished they had found a way to launch the product with a reach beyond US customers. In launching the product Hintz said the cost of taking on non-US cards appeared prohibitive but as they face the realities of rolling out the product he believes they should have been more aggressive with targeting more markets for launch.

Another learning from the launch was to engage more beta testers earlier. A lot of the features from the final product came from tester feedback. If he had his time again Hintz says that he would have brought on more testers earlier to increase the feedback and speed up the product dev. It was nice of him to be open and share this.

Thus we have a Travel 2.0 company prepared to turned to paid subscriptions for revenue. What do you think? Do you think people will pay for more/better tools for managing itineraries, points, connections and trips?

UPDATE - apologies to all at TripIt. I did screw up the embargo timing by 24 hours. Caused the TripIt team to scramble to launch a day earlier and brief people fast. I earned a justifiable "tut tut" from uber travel journalist Kevin May. Then I tried to bring my post down and instead deleted it, meaning I need to repost again with the comments in the main text rather than in the comments section. As I said via twitter I "..proved that bloggers are lazy and untrustworthy". Thankfully TripIt have graciously forgiven me for my mistake.

Here are the comments I deleted

Teddy Douglas said...

They couldn't find a non-US payment method!? What about PayPal?

24 June 2009 3:06 AM

Anonymous said...

Why pay $100 for TripIt, when you can get the same functionality from StreamThru for free?

24 June 2009 4:33 AM

Jeff said...

I just did a quick scan of the StreamThru site and it seems to indeed offer a similar product. Tim, have you used it?

24 June 2009 4:37 AM

Want to know how consumers search for Travel - well NY times has a few tips

Interesting piece here from the New York Times' "Frugal Traveler" called "Research: The Travller's Best Friend". Is an article where the Frugal Traveler gives their tips and tricks to NY Times readers on which sites to use to research, book and manage a trip. There will be no surprises for you the experienced online travel user/abuser but it does provider some useful insight into the advice the the mainstream media is giving the online consumer on where to look and book.

No blogs were mentioned. Sites getting a mention include:

• Google;
• Luxe Series of guide books;
• Kayak
• SeatGuru;
• Dealbase;
• TripAdvisor (but not in a good way);
• Craigslist;
• TripIt;
• Facebook;
• Couchsurfing;
• Oanda; and
• Flight 001 travel store

Also some old school recommendations to check out books.

Thanks for Madame BOOT for sending through the link.

Thanks to Kristina B for the fantastic image

TripIt Product review: ready to use and saving me time (mostly)

Back in November 2007 I tried Web2.0 travel start up Tripit for the first time. The product was in the early days of its beta launch and as a non-US based traveller I had unfortunately chosen suppliers not yet set up for TripIt. As a result the product did not work for me and I gave a poor review. After coming across TripIt again at the PhoCusWright Innovation Summit I decided to give them another try.

For those who have missed the hype around TripIt, it is an itinerary consolidation and sharing tool. You send to plans@tripit.com all of the itinerary emails you receive from various providers (air, car, hotel etc) and TripIt combines all of the elements into one itinerary. That itinerary can be then saved to your calendar and shared with others. When it works it allows for easier management of complicated itinerary and (most importantly) provides a central place for different people to view and interact with an itinerary (ie travel planner, spouse/partner, business colleagues, friends on the road).

Generally I like TripIt and am now making it a standard part of my travel planning. I particularly like the features that allow me to share my trip with others and have my travel arranger and I collaborate in the one place on a trip. There are still a few glitches and functionality pieces that need work but the product is useful and valuable in the time it saves me and others that wish to track my travels. There are three elements of this that I find attractive and will review – itinerary collation, itinerary management and itinerary sharing & networking.

Itinerary Collation – when it works it is seamless and makes complicated trip easier to manage. Even though I work for a large online travel agency when I book a business trip I often end up with specially negotiated itineraries for air, car and hotels (and often more than one). In the past I manually added them to my diary (no easy task with different time zones) or printed out lots of paper. There is a real “I love technology” pleasure when you simply forward all of them to one email address and an itinerary is automatically built. However I still have times when it does not work perfectly. On a recent trip to Madrid, I changed the airline to cover the London to Madrid leg of my trip. When I sent the new itinerary from my TMC to plans@tripit.com TripIt correctly added the new London – Madrid leg to my existing itinerary but doubled up on the Sydney to London piece – meaning I had the same flight SYD to LHR listed twice in the itinerary. It is not easy to delete one because you have to delete the “right one”. I deleted the wrong" version of the SYD to LHR leg and it also deleted the London to Madrid piece. In the end I deleted both and resent the itinerary by email. The something more frustrating happened. TripIt received the itinerary and added it to the right trip but for some reason tracked the Bangkok to London leg as happening before the Sydney to Bangkok leg. Required me to manually go in and change the dates on a leg of the trip to get the trip properly aligned. This made for a frustrating 30 mins on the computer which I am sure other customers would not have persisted with. It was a shame as I know the system works and have seen it work, just in this instance I hit a glitch. One other minor annoyance is that sometimes it copied across the terminal for a flight and sometimes did not. TripIt says it is aware of both of these issues and is working on them.

Itinerary Management – TripIt makes it very easy for the combined itinerary to be downloaded to calendar or synced with mobile devices. What is best with this is that it adds to my calendar taking into account the different time zones and (in my experience) matches perfectly. Very useful feature that says me time and paper shuffling in taxis and meetings. Naturally there is an iPhone app to support all this but I am still in the Blackberry universe so have not tried it

Itinerary Sharing & Networking – as a very active business traveller I have a lot of people I want to share my travels with. My boss, travel organiser, colleagues, Madame BOOT, son and more. I also want people to be able to add things to my itinerary as things come in (such as transfer confirmations). I love this feature of TripIt. I find the traveller arranger/sharing parts of TripIt the most valuable. It allows each of the connected people that I have to be able to see the same up to date trip that I see. If I extend a day, change hotel, move a flight etc – all the people I want to see that can see it. The process is great and I will use it again but is not perfect. I gave TripIt some feedback that they should make it a little clearer what timezones are in operation and when some one is where. This is especially true with long haul flights were I can leave one place on a Friday (which is actually Saturday at the destination) but not land until Sunday (which is still Saturday at the port of origination). There are also social networking elements available for meeting up with people that are in the same place you are. TripIt call this the "Who's Close" feature. Given my busy travel schedule I find that of less interest than the travel arranger sharing so don’t have a view on how the usefulness of that feature. I can see that if a user mass the size of Linkedin develops for TripIt then this feature could expand into areas currently dominated by WAYN and Meetup.

Turning to the business of TripIt I had a chance recently to talk with TripIt VP of Business Development Scott Hintz after the launch of the TripIt API and deal with Linkedin.

He wanted to share with me some of the early successes of the API such as the launch of seven applications and registration of more than 100 developers in the first 30 days of launch. One application he particular liked was Fligth Tracker Pro.

For TripIt the application angle is all about user acquisition. In a pattern I am seeing again and again for travel application/content companies the main form of distribution is partnership based rather and search engine based. This makes sense to me. I don’t see a large number of customer’s typing in “Trip Consolidation” into Google. Therefore I agree with the strategy of focusing on deals with networks liked Linkedin and eventually travel agents and OTAs as the means for TripIt distributing their product.

I wanted to talk to him about the monetisation efforts so far. Hintz was sounding very confident about the revenue potential for TripIt especially with the success of landing Marriott’s sponsorship fo the Linkedin plugin. He is also looking into revenue share for applications based on the API. With site traffic (mobile and web) at the 250k uniques level (and growing 20-40% month on month) you can understand his optimism. That said online banner ads are being hit hard by the downturn so I will be interested to see if they turn more to other forms of monetisation. Hintz also hinted at some premium paid service offerings - I am guessing more around travel planning and corporate services. They expect these revenues to be greater than advertising.

There are still pieces being worked on but I like TripIt and am using it.

If you are interested in more stories on TripIt you might enjoy the following:

• Interview with Founder Gregg Brockway;
• Commentary on fund raising round with Sabre's involvement; and
• Travel planning sites at PhoCusWright.
  

PhoCusWright: Trying to sort out the travel planners - Travelmuse, TripIt, GoPlanit, entrip, YourTour, NileGuide etc

Am at the PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit. 32 companies - mixture of start-up and mature companies- are pitching a new product in the hope of gaining industry support. We are half way through the summit and a theme is emerging very quickly around travel planning. No surprise of course. Again and again at non-travel internet events it has been the trip planner that has generated the buzz. Witness TripIt and the 2007 TechCrunch40 event and GoPlanIt at the 2008 TechCrunch50 event. Today at PCW we have already heard from TripIt, TripJane and Travelmuse (update and now YourTour update 2 and now NileGuide). At WebInTravel we also heard from entrip. Common functionalities are coming through each of these companies - the ability to integrate and add trip elements and content from other websites; the ability to share and build a network; and the ability to build a "living" itinerary with all elements.

The differences are just as stark as the similarities. Each of these companies (and others) are approaching the business from a different angle.


In the case of TripIt - the experience starts with using TripIt to combine the disparate itineraries that appear in email from an airline, hotel provider, destination service etc.

With entrip - the experience starts with a map. Consumers connect the points they wish to travel between and entrip provides (or facilitates) the content and booking functionality.

At GoPlanIt - the experience starts with a destination. Crowd sourcing and social networking elements recommend a trip itinerary including details on activities.


For Travelmuse - the experience starts with content. A regularly published online travel magazine that has morphed into a trip planning and sharing system.

With YourTour - the experience starts with traveller desired experiences . Building a trip recommendation based on the broad trip desires entered by the consumer.

Through NileGuide - the experience starts with the desire to build a guidebook for a destination. One document to replace the the myriad of documents that even the simpliest of trips end up generating.


And finally for TripJane - the experience starts with Facebook.



I was working on setting some criteria for judging which of these will be the most successful. Trying to set up a scoring or ranking system to judge on areas such as technology, UI, marketing, business model and people. I realised that if I continued with this thinking, then I was setting me up for a very complicated task (lots of work). Critically I quickly came to the realisation that this list of judging criteria was all but irrelevant because there is one success factor that is more important. I call it "survivability". It seems circular that the most important cirteria for success is the ability to survive but in the case of a travel 2.0 start ups that are content heavy I see the most important factor for success the ability of the company to survive for a the next two years. To keep the product up, live, growing, changing and adapting. Staying alive while the long path to consumer acceptance is trod. Giving the company time to test itself and prove that their approach is the right one. I have a personal favourite in the list and there one that I don't get but that's not important. What is important is that these companies need to make sure that they have a lot of runway (ie can survive for a long time on the money that they have) and are able to change and adapt on a dime.

What do you think?

UPDATED - to include YourTour

UPDATED 2 - to include NileGuide

What's a better idea, entrip, Conference Bay or TripFilms? Depends who you ask.

WebInTravel hosted a "Start-Up Pitch" session. Much in the form of a very scaled down TechCrunch50, this session saw a short list of three companies engaging in a strict 5 minute pitch to a judging panel made up of investors and venture capitalist. The three finalists in the pitch were

- entrip. a travel organisation company based in India. Presented by founder and boss Anthony Hsiao. This company is trying to be the ultimate in travel organisation mash-ups. A way to bring together all of the elements of planning, tracking and sharing a trip. It ha as UI that enables a traveller to plot on a map where they are going and then have automated links to content, information, booking profiles and a place to store and share. Planning sites are gaining traction recently. GoPlanit and TripIt have been passed members of the TechCrunch50 (interview with GoPlanit here and TripIt here). entrip's difference is in its UI. By using a map based approach entrip gives the user a very different approach to planning and booking. The site has just started so there are challenges ahead fro Hsiao and the rest of the team but is a great beginning.

- Conference Bay is trying to be the eBay/Priceline of conferences. A market place that gives conference organisers and opportunity to distribute their tickets on name your own price/auction model. A clearing house for conference tickets. The theory being that every incremental ticket is pure profit for a conference organiser given the high sunk costs. I see the market here but the challenge is that conference organisers are very wary of open up any channel that promotes discounting. To get a conference up and running it is critical to get people booking early rather than waiting for deals and the last minute. That said, with economic doom and gloom all around us this might be the perfect time to be an aggregator of the potentially dropping demand for conferences.


- TripFilms was the final pitch of the day. The pitch was led by Jim Donnelly (founder and former boss of the now Sabre owned IgoUgo). Jim is an investor in TripFilms, the TripFilms founder and boss is his ex-partner in IgoUgo (Tony Cheng). Jim's pitch was a direct one. TripFilms is IgoUgo but in video. A place for the creation and distribution of high quality destination and travel videos.

Who won? entrip pulled the "people's choice award" by wining the popular vote from the audience but TripFilms secure the title by winning over the judging panel. The panel was impressed by the pedigree of the founders of TripFilms (they had already built and sold a company) as well as the immediacy of the business model around video content. On Conference Bay the panel expressed the same concerns I have above. For entrip, the panel loved the site but belived there were a lot of challenges in getting the distribution right.

What's your vote?

Official WIT version of the story here.

GoPlanIt - interview with COO Jimmy Ku on the day the Dow imploded

It is start up interview and profile week here at the BOOT. Earlier this week we talked with Yen Lee of UpTake about how he felt cashing a $10,000,000 cheque moments before the Dow went into (the first of many) freefall(s). Then I posted an exchange with Our Explorer CEO Dave Cunningham about his efforts to match tour guides with lost tourists.

Today I had a chance to speak with GoPlanit COO Jimmy Ku. You’ll recall that GoPlanit was the only travel company to be part o the high profile start-up competition TechCrunch50. My earlier profile of them is here.

Discussions around money

On any normal day our interview would have focused on GoPlanit's plans to move from beta to a full release, how they would generate traffic and thoughts on balancing editorial and user generated content. Unfortunately this is not a normal day. On this day Washington degenerated into a $700 billion game of “I like George Bush less than you do” driving the Dow down 778 points (check out this interactive graphic on nytimes.com tracking the decline of the Dow with the counting of the nae votes– registration required). Unsurprisingly it meant we spent time talking about GoPlanit’s plans for raising their first full round of funding. As the Crunchbase profile states and Ku confirmed GoPlanit have raised $500k in seed capital. This is enough to support current efforts and the team of 7 but Ku admits that they will need more.

Thankfully for GoPlanit the profile boost of Techcrunch50 participation has opened a huge number of doors as they look for funding. As Ku put it Techcrunc50 guaranteed me “days of back to back meetings”. But even Ku admits that the horror on the Dow going to make it tougher. “Anyone not scared [about the Dow decline] is probably lying” said Ku “but good products will still make money and VCs will still invest in those that can succeed”

Discussions around traffic

It is too early for Ku to share any traffic numbers with us but we did discuss GoPlanit’s marketing tactics. As expected the focus will be on SEO through user and editorial content. GoPlanit needs to take time to develop each destination it is planning to launch through connecting tot a “respectable source” of content and information, building out the links to providers and setting up the framework for attracting user generated content.

Sidebar - While discussing this I noticed that both TripIt and TripAdvisor are bidding on the keyword phrase “planning a trip” (as you can see in this poorly cropped photo image).



This seemed odd to Ku. He said (and I agree) that you want to attract the people looking for a destination not someone generically searching for a trip planning tool.

Discussions around the founders

The idea behind GoPlanit is best drawn directly from CEO Steve Chen’s presentation at Techcrunch50. In short the founders separately experienced the pain of trying to organise large holidays. In Ku’s case he found himself as the designated organiser for group holidays with friends. In CEO Chen's case it was in organising his honeymoon and his general experiences post a career with Accenture as an event organiser in the Bay Area. Chen and Ku are also joined in the founder club by CTO James Chen, most recently of CNET, Rotten Tomatoes and HotorNot.

My take

I like the idea and as with many start up interviews with travel content/tool companies, if they can generate the traffic, then the ad revenue will follow. The CPM rates and advertising desire for good consumer travel eyeballs is strong enough to survive this economic Bush-wacking. The challenge is raising the money to support the product to attract the eyeballs on a day no one can get $700 billion from the US government.

Related News

• TechCrunch story on a site upgrade at the Microsoft backed PlanetEye;
• TechCrunch story on impact of the credit crunch/implosion on VCs and Startups; and
  
• Jason Calacanis on "the Startup Depression"
  

GoPlanIt - the Travel representative in the TechCrunch50

The second annual TechCrunch50 conference is over. This is the start up demonstration conference organised by web-celeb and CEO of Mahalo Jason Calacanis and uber blogger Mike Arington of TechCrunch. The conference profiles 50 web/tech start-ups, which compete for a $50,000 prize.

This year's travel nominee/competitor (there only ever seems to be one) was GoPlanIt.

GoPlanIt is a trip planning site. Enabling consumers to add activities, trip itineraries, maps and commentary to a trip plan. Naturally it comes with reviews and social networking/sharing/mobile access elements. It's difference from a "standard" web 2.0 planning site is that you can hit the PlanIt button and have a trip itinerary automatically recommended and built based on the behaviour of other users. This of course can then be modified and edited. The only downside is the that it takes time to build up the necesary history nad connections. Hence the service is currently only available in America. Here is the TechCrunch review/profile.

Being the travel nominee for 2007 was a great kickstart last year for TripIt. Since being part of TechCrunch50 they have raised another round (including an investment from Sabre). Just recently announce that the CEO of Mozilla Corporation (John Lilly) joined the TripIt board. Just this week king of the blogs Robert Scoble asked his readers/twitterers which online travel services they used. TripIt was mentioned again and again in the replies. You can re-read my interview with TripIt CEO Gregg Brockway here.

You can see a video stream of the GoPlanIt presentation here by CEO and founder Steve Chen and the presentation of the eventually winner - Yammer (TechCrunch Profile)

TripIt raises money - and Sabre is one of the investors

I am a week or so late (on a lot of things) to comment on the story around TripIt raising funds. As a quick reminder to those that don't know, TripIt is a a tool for combining all of the disparate booking itineraries into one and adds in a little bit of networking for flavour. I interviewed CEO Gregg Brockway here. In that interview Brockway hinted at an imminent VC round.

A week or so ago the TripIt announced a Series B of US$5.1mm on top of the Series A US$1mm from O'Reilly AlphaTech. I was about to do a simple update to my interview post when I looked closely at the entities participating in the round. O'Reilly AlphaTech are back for more and have been joined by the EuropeanFounders Fund. The big news is that Sabre Holdings have joined the round. This is noteworthy for obvious reasons - OATV and EFF are funds - but Sabre is not only an operating company, they are an operating company with significant existing only assets (Travelocity, Lastminute, IgoUgo and so much more). I was drawn to the fact that there is no quote from a Sabre executive in the story on HotelMarketing.com.

This is interesting for two reasons:

1. It is a very small investment for Sabre. Even if they put in the largest share, this is a very small deal for company that was privatised for $5 billion. It takes more than just an investment return for a multi-billion dollar travel company to spend the time needed for a $5.1mm dollar deal; and

2. Sabre is presumably an operational investor rather than a returns investor. That is Sabre is presumably looking for eventually taking operational advantage of the technology or reach or both of TripIt rather than a simple investment return. It also eliminates a lot of potential buyers. What are the chances of Expedia, Priceline, etc buying TripIt with Sabre as a shareholder?

If I read this right, Sabre would only invest if it has more than a investment return plan. If it had plans to bring TripIt into the business at one point - likely some part of the Travelocity media sections (including IgoUgo). Any readers from TripIt or Sabre care to make a comment?

501 not out

Time has passed and the posts keep flowing. Time for my "not out series" - a regular summary of the last 100 posts that I first started with 101 not out and continued with 201 , 301
and 401.

Just like the 401 update it has been deals, deals, deals that has dominated the last 100 BOOT rants:

• Wotif evenutally managed to by Travel.com.au/Lastminute.com.au despite a fight from Webjet and a cunning move from AOT. Followed up almost immediately buying Asia Web Direct;
• TripAdvisor launched a new version and continued its targeted site buying spree with HolidayWatchdog;
• TravelCLICK was sold to Genstar and the BOOT called it first;
• The Asian acquisition bonanza continued as Priceline returned to the market though an acquisition of Agoda, ;
• Sidestep disappeared in a flood of newly raised Kayak cash; and
  
• Venere bought Worldby.
  

Cash flowed into online travel:

• Fastbooking took Euro35mm;
  
• Worktopia grabbed $5mm;
  
• Bezurk got "an undisclosed sum" from News;
  

I spent some interesting times on the phone doing start up interviews with:

• Yen Lee of Kango;
  
• Gregg Brockway of TripIt;
  
• Martin Symes of Bezurk; and
• Kellie Pelletier of Kayak.

In the weird world of quirky news:

• bags fell from the sky;
  
• The president of Sri Lanka got bumped and was not happy about it;
  
• Man fired dog and bragged about it; and
  
• nobody, I repeat nobody is doing anything naughty naughty in the new Singapore Airlines double bed suites.

Oh and Qantas turned from being the flying Kangaroo to the thieving Rat.

But I saved my most angriest post for number 400 - the last in this seasons. When the new Australian government said they were doing me a favour by continuing to allow Qantas to over charge me on flights to America.

If you're still reading then I'm still writing.

TripIt Sessions: Interview with TripIt CEO Gregg Brockway

The BOOT remarked recently on the entry of travel start-up TripIt into the A-league of start ups for 2007 through its anointment through its admission by Valley A-listers Michael Arrington and Jason Calacanis into the Techcrunch40 conference. I blogged about that and my initial experiences in using the product. Through the power of the interweb this post led to a chance to interview TripIt Founder and CEO Gregg Brockway. Here are some of the stories from that conversation.

Where did the TripIt idea come from

Tripit’s pitch to the online travel consumer bombarded with too much information is to give the consumer one place to send all of the confirmations that are generated from suppliers and retailers to be stored and organised in one spot. From that one spot recommendations and ancillary services can be provided. The idea came to Brockway and co-founders Scott Hintz and Andy Denmark from two related trends

1. booking travel online is hard. It should be easy as online travel is 10+ years old and a mature market but it is still hard to do. Multiple sites, multiple formats and big value items; and

2. the supplier direct market is the fastest growing section increasing the number of sites consumers are booking on to put together a holiday.

Oh – and the founders have an addiction to start ups.

New features coming out regularly. Latest was integration into online calendars (hotelmarketing.com).

Where did the founders come from?

Brockway was part of the crew that built up Hotwire and sold it to Expedia (then part of IAC). He then moved into a divisional president role heading up Classic Vacations - the luxury travel and offline part of Expedia. As Gregg admitted, hardly a good home for an Internet focused executive.

How hard is it to connect to a supplier? Do you need their co-operation?

Brockway says they have invested a lot up front in building a system that can easily adapt to different data fields and structures. A new site/supplier can be added “in a few hours” to the list of those that can have there data exported into a TripIt combined itinerary. The selection processes for which supplier to do next is easy – whatever are submitted the most by users that are not already in the system. Biggest challenge to face is PDF itineraries. They recently launched the first version of their PDF reading functionality which is working on a vendor by vendor basis. Once they have that right the number two challenge is when email confirmation is a link to details on a web page.

Other team and company bits and pieces

• Staff: 10 staff.
• Traffic: First full month of traffic was 45,000 users. Month two “bigger than month one”. The part I liked about this traffic story was that a mention in Lifehacker drew more traffic than a mention in the New York Times.
  
• Users: 40% of users are outside the US. Not what they expected.

How did you raise your money

It took TripIt six months to put the product in a state before it could rais its million dollar round with O'Reilly AlphaTech. Needed to have an alpha to show the businesses. Brockway believes it is a challenging environment for travel startups to get funding. This is mainly because travel is not the hot sector that it once was in VC activity, especially compared to video, social networking, alternative energy etc.

Revenue?

Advertising!

My Take

A lot of the pieces are in place for TripIt to succeed. Brockway and his founders know the space and have thought this through. They have cash. I can see the need for the product. I have just this week booked a flight for Madame BOOT to return to the homeland for a visit (Italy). It involves two separately booked flights on two separate carriers with two separate confirmation slips. Last week I booked a family trip to New Zealand. Three sets of confirmation (air, car and farmhouse). Monetisation should not been an issue. If TripIt can connect to a critical mass of suppliers and generate traffic, then monetisation is easy as travel advertisers love to pay for access to travel consumers. The challenge remains around acquiring the traffic. This is a big challenge. The meta-search start ups get their traffic in an arbitrage game between search engines and travel advertisers. The Travel 2.0 start-ups get their traffic by becoming SEO/Long Tail magicians. Brockway and team are going to the harder route of “build a fantastic product and they will come”. Once out of beta the product should be good enough – question is “will they come”?

UPDATE May 1 08- during the interview Brockway hinted at the imminent closing of a funding round. Announcement a week or so ago that a round closed. Sabre is an investor. See update here.

Trying out TripIt - "a problem with your TripIt submission"

I had a chance to try TipIt and have put together a review. You will recall that TripIt is the well funded booking organiser startup that gained some fame as being the only travel company to make it into the Techcrunch40 list. The theory is that you email all your travel booking vouchers/invoices and confirmation emails to a central TripIt email (plans@tripit.com) and the service would magically combine it all into one itinerary that can be shared, printed and generally Web2.0ed all over the place

I had wondered in my earlier post how the TripIt technology would go about "reading" all of the different forms of confirmation emails (especially pdfs) that travel companies send.

I conducted a test by sending through to the TripIt mail all the details from a recent trip to Melbourne made up of a Virginblue flight voucher, RatesToGo.com hotel voucher and Melbourne Skybus airport transfer ticket.

Unfortunately, the common response to each of these three emails to TripIt was

We received your email (Subject Line: [whatever the booking was]) but had a problem processing it. This typically happens when your email is not from one of our currently supported booking sites or when your TripIt To Me text isn't in the right format (for help with TripIt To Me, send an email with a blank subject line and the word "help" in the body to plans@tripit.com and we'll respond with a list of available commands).

We placed your email into the Unfiled Items section of your account as an unformatted Note for your review. Please follow this link to login to view your Note.

Happy Travels!

The TripIt Team
support@tripit.com

Not a great first time user experience. It is clear that the confirmation information has to be in a very set format or from the list of supported vendors. There is a good number of companies on the supported list (here) including biggies Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity and Priceline as well as major airlines and leading LCCs such as easyJet and Ryanair. However there also a lot of well known brands missing such as lastminute.com, Accor.com, Qantas, Booking.com, HotelClub.com and Venere.com.

The site is still in beta so there is reason to be forgiving. However customers give very few second changes to content/mashup based websites - even those in beta. My conclusion therefore remains the same - great idea but the execution needs to be flawless for the business to work. That is a big ask for any travel start up, even a well funded one. Anyone else have a TripIt experience to share?

TripIt - Now we know what they do and that they are in with the "in crowd"

I passed on the news in April that TripIt had raised a million dollars in funding. Now the site is live (in beta of course) and we have more of an idea of what they do and what CEO Greg Brockway plans to do with the money.

TripIt is a travel organisation and collaboration site but with a real twist. Instead of the now usual Web 2.0 approach of letting you tag pages or save pages or integrate pages from various booking and content sites, TripIt works by extracting all of the confirmation information you have from your booking emails and putting it in the one consolidated form. Here is how they describe it

Here’s how TripIt works: A traveler simply forwards their travel confirmation emails – no matter where they booked - and the TripIt “Itinerator” instantly incorporates them into their master itinerary. Then, TripIt puts that information to work on the traveler’s behalf by automatically anticipating basic needs to make the trip easier, such as adding daily weather, local maps and directions, helpful destination information and more by using information pulled from a variety of other popular websites. Travelers can then print out all their bookings neatly in a single document to take on their trip.

If they get it right then the opportunities for upselling and profiling consumers will be fantastic.

Two challenges -

1. Getting consumers to use it. It a world of instant gratification it will challenging to convince consumers to email and wait; and

2. This presumably requires some very complicated technology. The system will need to be able to extract different types of booking information from thousands of possible sites, all with different itinerary formats. Assuming they build up the consumer base, the technology will have work perfectly every time or else it will lose the main draw card - convenience.

Love the idea but big job to get it working.

The PR campaign is already working. TripIt has proven itself to me a member of the VC/Valley in-crowd. They were the only travel company in the Techcrunch40, the just completed web startup demonstration conference hosted by tech/VC blogging A-listers Michael Arrington of Techrcunch and Jason Calacanis of Mahalo.

Here is the crunchbase profile of TripIt and here is an earlier post I did on Mahalo.

UPDATE - Another of the A-lister sites, GigaOM, is not giving TripIt much of a chance.

TripIt - not sure what they do but they have a million bucks to do it with

Alarm:Clock and Venture Beat are both carrying the story that pre-launch TripIt has raised a million dollars in funding from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. Front page of the site gives away nothing as to what this million bucks will do but does have a catchy phrase about how online travel needs a new model. The only executive/f0under mentioned in the articles is Greg Brockway - formally of Expedia where he was originally the Chief Product Office (and a founder) at Hotwire before moving to run the offline wholesaler Classic Vacations.

A million dollars is a good money for a pre-launch start-up, especially in the crowded travel space. You could see this as evidence that there are still amazing opportunities for idea clutching entrepreneurs in online travel to raise funds. However as a co-founder of Hotwire, Brockway is not your typical idea clutching online travel entrepreneur because with the sale of Hotwire to Expedia (well really to InterActive but same thing) for $665 million plus in 2003 he made lot of money for PE power-house firm Texas Pacific Group (as well as airlines American, America West, Continental, Northwest, United and USAirways).

Good to see former Expedia staff sticking with online travel rather than start-ups in real estate, shopping, legal affairs and social networking.

UPDATE - looks like Expedia likes finding Classic Vacations bosses from Hotwire. News from the US TravelWeekly is that the new head of Classic will be Tim Mcdonald who, like Brockway, was in his previous role the head of product at Hotwire

UPDATE 2 - Here is how Greg Brockway describes what Tripit will do (thanks to Hotelmarketing)

"Online travel is more than a decade old and travelers use multiple sites to book their trips. TripIt is the next wave in online travel, helping travelers consolidate and organize all their travel no matter where they book.
With TripIt, you simply email us your travel confirmation emails and we do the rest. First, we’ll automatically add the basic information you need to make almost every trip easier, such as maps, weather, directions, destination info and more. Second, we’ll help you share your travel plans with the people who need to know--friends, family & co-workers. Third, with a consolidated view of your plans, we can anticipate user needs and make relevant suggestions. Finally, by integrating with the applications people use most, TripIt will give you access to the right information when and where you need it - online, in print, via mobile, or in your calendar."

Still not sure how that works so will have to wait until I can see it in action.