I don’t travel much, but enough to know the pain of having to keep track of:
- which train/flight do I need to catch?
- which hotel did I make my reservation at?
TripIt is a service that aims to really fix this for its’ users. It does so by:
- scanning your e-mail
- combining reservations (hotel, car rental, flights, …) into one single, unitified and glorious itinerary per trip
- providing some other automated services in case of a missed flight etc
The Good
They really understand the problem frequent travelers experience. So their solution is pretty accurate, although very US centered.
- perfectly picked up my KLM flight reservation
- perfectly picked up one of my Hotels.com reservations
The Bad
In a response to my support e-mail, I learned that in general they “optimize English language”, which to me honestly just sounds like a poor way of saying “if not English, sorry, don’t care”.
- failed to pickup my two BA confirmation e-mails
- didn’t accept my Business MasterCard (which all other services I’ve tried accepts …)
-
didn’t succeed with all my reservations made through Hotels.com (only the one in the Netherlands, two in London failed)
- Don’t scan for new e-mail often enough
- Why only scan the inbox? That’s not really compatible with any type of person that works with “zero inbox”, or any type of archiving scheme. I imaging people with attention to sorting schemes to be common in the frequent flyers group, hence TripIt’s main customer group
- Didn’t notify me of the e-mails it failed to parse, although all reservations world-wide are sent from the same e-mail address. I would expect this to happen automatically.
The Ugly
None that I know of. For sure, you give them access to your full e-mail account for best service (or you forward e-mails to them).
Request And Bottomline
Am I just complaining? I think not: I made 6 reservations for three trips, out of which:
- 1 was automatically picked up and correctly parsed
- 1 was forwarded (manually) and parsed correctly
- 4 was not picked up, and none of them were correctly parsed when forwarded
If I ran TripIt, what would I do?
- I would start looking at sender addresses to determine if “this is something we should (be able to) parse”, not only subject lines
- I would enable a “scan my e-mail now” button, at least for Pro users
- I would look into subscribing to the stream of e-mails, instead of scanning mail accounts every now and then
- I would be open about how often we scan those who connect e-mail accounts
- I would open source the parsing of e-mail so that techies (like myself) could contribute and expand my business without us having to do all the work (a pull-request, in order to be accepted, would need to include: an reference example (real) e-mail; an automated test case; production code that does the parsing)
- I would hire a UI person to update the UI to look like it was designed after release 1.0 of jQuery UI
- I would openly list the services we support, and our backlog of services yet to be supported
- I would remove the ads for Pro users
For now, I’ll look for another service.