This is the forth in a series of application reviews - VRM Labs app catwalk. Our source are applications that are seen, claim to be or are mentioned in connection with VRM which are then reviewed according to VRM-based criteria. Suggestions of applications that you wish us to look are welcome. adriana dot lukas at gmail dot com. We aim to one every week.

One of the earliest scenarios for VRM has been travel. For me travel starts with the ability to capture data during planning my travel and to store them for future reference, whether making a similar trip or assisting somebody else on theirs.

TripIt is an online service that helps people organize all their travel plans—flights, hotels, rental cars, trains, cruises—no matter where they booked. To get started, travelers just forward their travel confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com. TripIt processes these emails and automatically creates a master itinerary with travel plans, daily weather, local maps, restaurant reservations, city guides and more. With TripIt, travelers can print, access and share their travel plans online, from a mobile device or even in their personal calendar.

The site aggregates your various booking and travel confirmation emails into Travel Plans based on dates.

At the heart of TripIt is the Itinerator, which is TripIt’s patent-pending and proprietary technology for automatically creating itineraries from travel confirmation emails. The Itinerator is an open technology platform that works with all major travel websites and all major email systems. A person simply forwards TripIt their original travel confirmation emails and then TripIt extracts the data to create a combined master online itinerary.

There is also a number of tools such as TripClipper that allows you to clip bits of text from websites are you surf. Very useful when searching for a hotel, let’s say, and putting all the reviews together to make the final decision.

TripIt to Me is another feature that lets you get your trip information from anywhere you have access to email, including mobile devices. Just send a command to plans@tripit.com and we’ll email you the information right away. For example, if you email “get trip” to plans@tripit.com, TripIt will email back your current trip itinerary for today.

I have been in situations where I either forgot to print my itinerary or the print-out is sitting on my printer forgotten. A useful back up.

TripIt takes user data and stores them on their own platform. Data is inputed either manually or by emailing it to plans@tripit.com. I couldn’t find any way of exporting the data, which usually can be found in section about closing an account. You can merge account, you can delete it but nowhere is a way of exporting your accumulated travel history/data.

screenshot of delete account

Although there is no export, there is two other features that allow you to get your data out one way or another:

One is the site’s use of microformats - HTML code added to pages that enables certain data, such as contact information, locations and events to be extracted by a microformat reader. This needs to be installed as a browser add-on.

The other is the API for developers - TripIt wants to be an open platform for integration and organization of travel information from many different sources. The TripIt API allows third parties to easily interface with this platform and:

• Seamless email import technology for your customers to add travel plans to your application
• Insight into a traveler’s entire trip (air, hotel, car, restaurants, meetings, etc.)
• Outputting travel data to social network applications

Not exactly direct data ownership for the user but there doesn’t seem anything stopping development of an exporter/importer for my TripIt data. So this is another step forward, even if sideways, for freedom of my data.

The data type is specific, i.e. relating to travel. As for data crunching, the data is organised in itineraries and travel plans, with forms to be filled in or data automatically structured by the Itinerator. In order to provide consistent information, i.e. itineraries, a fair amount of structure is imposed on the user when filling in the details manually. I found that my travel data exists in more than just email or free text, e.g. PDFs and converting everything into either graphic to be attached to an itinerary or manually inputing it, seems rather laborious for my taste.

There is not much ability to add value to your data other than its aggregation on the site in a particular format and structure. This falls more under visualisation or display of data rather than data reduction, i.e. analysis or inferences based on your data.

There is value, of course, in making that data accessible in different ways (feeds, email, mobile etc) and available in different formats (HTML/microformats, iCal, Atom, etc)

tripIt travel data consists of partly your input and data generated by your travel providers (confirmation email).

There are a number of ways to share you travel plans, both private and public:

1. Private sharing invitations – In most cases, this is the best method for sharing your trips. You send an invitation to someone by email, granting them access to view your trip. Only you and people you specifically invite have access to your travel plans. You can even set permission levels so that invitees may only view your trip, or you can let them modify the trip by making them collaborators.
2. Public sharing by URL – You can generate a special link/URL that will let anyone view your trip. This method is helpful if you want to post your trip on your blog or in some other forum, where any member of the public could view your itinerary. Because trips often contain sensitive personal data, use public URL sharing cautiously.

screenshot of public sharing by URL

Another way of getting information out of TripIt is feeds:

TripIt account has certain feeds meant for your personal use and certain feeds meant for you to make available to others. Your Alerts and Personal Calendar feeds are only available to you and should remain private. Your Location Stream and Activity Feed can be made available to Your TripIt Network or Everyone.

Here I subscribe to Simon Phipps activity feed:

screenshot of activity feed subscription

Activity feed contains information about things you’ve done in TripIt, and is mainly used to keep others up to date on your travel plans. This feed will post stories when:

• You have made new Connections
• You are planning a new trip, just returning from a trip or about to leave on a trip

A bit of a howler in the FAQ:

Uh oh.

As for community there are TripIt Connections in your Network.

A Connection in TripIt is someone with whom you want to share information about yourself and your travels, on a continual basis. Your Connections will automatically be able to see a list of the destinations associated with your TripIt itineraries, and you can see the same for your Connections.

The TripIt privacy policy states their attitude to data
 with regard to 3rd parties
:

With business firms contracted to provide specific services to us, in a manner consistent with this Privacy Policy. In situations such as this where your data is shared with a third-party firm, the firm will be contractually obligated to use your personal data only for the purpose for which our relationship with the firm exists. The firm will not have the right to share your data with other organizations or contact you outside the bounds of their contract with us.

User have a chance to authorise or deny any sharing of personal information with 3rd parties:

Other than as set out above, you will be notified when personal information about you will be shared with third parties, and you will have an opportunity to choose not to have us share such information.

From the section on Third Party Advertising:

From time to time, we may use a third-party advertising company to serve advertising on our behalf. Through the use of technology devices commonly referred to as cookies and action tags, this third-party ad-serving company can measure the effectiveness of our ads.

And further:

Our third-party ad server may also receive specific information about your use of the Service. Rest assured that this shared information is anonymous and does not contain any sensitive information.

There is a standard contact us page and I haven’t been able to find any names of people for that purpose. There are bios of the team together with their itinerary, in case you really need to track them down.

The business impact
 is most likely displacement of any enterprise or desktop software designed for travel management in large corporations. TripIt is explicitly aimed at business traveller:

Based on the following, I was going to assume that TripIt could be installed on a company’s servers for customised and internal use, making travel arrangements and connections web and user friendly:

TripIt already has business users at all 100 of the BTN 100 top-traveling companies and 76 of Fortune 100 companies, including leading companies like Apple, Cisco, Deloitte, Expedia, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Sun, and Yahoo. To get your company supported, just forward your business travel confirmation emails to TripIt.

However, this is what the founder said about revenue model in an interview last year:

TripIt, to be clear, is not a travel booking site and we don’t want to be in the travel booking business. That’s super competitive and there are lots of places that do that quite well. We want to be in the information management and sharing business, so our revenue model is a combination of lead generation to people who do book travel or components of travel plus hyper targeted advertising. So that’s how we expect to make money.

The payment model
 free to users. Judging from the mention of third-party advertising in the privacy policy, the revenue is meant to come from advertisers though I haven’t seen any adverts so far.

As with most social web services, there is little relationship with the platform and more with connections made through it.