As many of you prepare for the upcoming holiday travel season, we want to remind you that TripIt is here to help you stay on top of all of your plans. Follow these simple tips to make the most of TripIt for holiday travel.

Forward your travel confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com to have all your travel plans in one place. It doesn’t matter where you book. TripIt supports more than 800 different travel booking sites. View a sample holiday itinerary here. 

Want to avoid the frustration of passing along the same flight number, arrival times and airline info to dozens of different people? Trip sharing is an easy way to keep your friends and family informed. You can share trips via email, public URL, or your favorite social network. Learn more about trip sharing.

3. Go mobile 

Use your mobile device to access your itinerary anytime, anywhere via TripIt’s mobile site, m.tripit.com. You can also download our free iPhone app and have all of your plans right on your iPhone while you travel. Look up flight numbers, hotel addresses and other important trip information when you’re on the go.

Most important of all, we wish you a very safe and happy holiday season, whether you’re preparing for a trip, en route, or have successfully arrived at your destination!

The mobile, social networking, and new web trends we’ve discussed are helping to bring about a Traveler-Centric Future. Once upon a time, business travel, leisure travel, and social networks all occupied neat, distinct spaces in the world. Today, these spaces increasingly overlap, and we see all types of travelers using social networks to research trips and stay connected on the road. This convergence makes the travel industry better for all of its participants.  

 In the Traveler-Centric Future, a traveler’s information will flow freely across all the different services they want to use, resulting in a profoundly better travel experience. The widespread availability of high-speed mobile internet means that more intelligent services will be available to every traveler when they are needed most. Typically, that will be while the traveler is on the road. 

Here are some snippets from the Traveler-Centric Future...

Companies with traveling employees will have dramatically improved visibility into the whereabouts and security of these employees. With the availability of services that aggregate the traveler’s information and share it with other services, people won’t fall off the grid when travel is booked outside a managed program. The result will be a better understanding of spending habits, which allows for better cost control, whether through improved compliance or voluntary changes in traveler behavior. Unmanaged business programs, in particular, will benefit from insight into where people are traveling and how travel funds are being spent.  

Travel suppliers will also win, with opportunities for improved efficiency and more personalized service. For example, the free flow of information could mean limo services will always know when travelers are delayed because a driver “bot” talks to an air “bot” for regular updates on flight progress. Also, suppliers today spend millions (or even tens of millions) on highly sophisticated CRM systems that anticipate customer needs and marketing opportunities. Life could be much easier in a Traveler-Centric Future, where a traveler’s portable travel persona can automatically share their preferences (king bed and USA Today, please) and travel needs (I am receptive to New York City offers, because I make 6 trips there each year).  

Perhaps the most exciting implications of convergence are those for the individual traveler, who will have all their travel information in one place, and be able to share that information with any service they want to use. When different services can interact with each other, the whole travel experience will be smoother.  

Take a typical flight delay, for example. In the Traveler-Centric Future, an alert about the delay will be pushed to the traveler’s mobile device, and any alternatives will be weighed by the different services the traveler uses, and presented to the traveler automatically. These services will also reschedule the traveler’s rental car pick-up and business meetings, and let the spouse know the traveler won’t be home for dinner. After the trip is over the expense report will be a snap, because one click shares the all the relevant travel information with the traveler’s expense solution.  

  

Shopping will also be radically better for travelers. When travel profile information and plans are shareable, the traveler’s experience on travel sites will be tailored to their specific needs. For example, today, Orbitz treats millions of visitors each month in basically the same way. If Orbitz knows automatically that a traveler likes boutique hotels with free wifi, and is 1K on United, and is planning a trip to San Diego, Orbitz will be able to do a much better job of helping that traveler get what they want, with minimal effort.

How cool is that?

Travel is truly one of life’s great joys and I'm excited to see what will happen to our industry as travelers and travel companies embrace the opportunity for innovation and change. The Traveler-Centric Future, powered by mobile technology, social networks, and the new web, is something to celebrate, because it’s opening up a new, and better, world for travelers and all the businesses that serve them.

We're excited to announce that we just launched trip merging on TripIt! If you have more than one itinerary associated with a single trip, you can use trip merging to create a single convenient itinerary. 

Merging trips is easy.  

First, go to your list of trips, and select “Merge Trips” from the “Options” drop-down menu for the itinerary you want to merge with another.

Then, choose which trip you want to combine it with.

Like mobile technology and social networks, the web itself is evolving to become more open and accessible. Up until now, the Internet has provided a wealth of information for people, but the information has been almost entirely invisible to machines. Increasingly, computers can understand and use this web data too, and web-based applications are becoming better able to interact and share data in the cloud without our involvement. The end result is new services springing up that can take on increasingly complicated tasks to make our lives easier.

Let me take you on a whirlwind tour of the evolution of the Internet and online travel.   

Web 1.0 - I like to call this first generation of internet the “one-way web” because it was really based around ecommerce sites and getting content pushed out to the people. Think early Expedia, or static guidebooks. 

Web 2.0 - In the next big wave of innovation, a host of new Internet companies were created around what is now known as user generated content and social networking. I like to call this the “two-way web”, because the people using the websites are either creating the content or actually are the content, interacting with other users over web platforms. The poster-child for Web 2.0 in travel is TripAdvisor.  

The New Web - Today, there is a new phenomena that promises to change the web. It has many different names. Some people call it the Semantic Web, others the Data Web, Agent Web or even Web 3.0. I don’t know what it will eventually be called, but I do know a defining characteristic of this new web is application to application interaction. For this reason, we like to call it the “interoperable web”.  

This evolution and interoperability is something that has been a topic of conversation for some time. In fact, Tim Berners-Lee, the man widely acknowledged as the inventor of the Internet, predicted this a long time ago. In 1999, he wrote:

Of course, in the travel business, "agents" is a loaded word. The increasingly smart applications that we see emerging are no threat to travel agents for the foreseeable future. However, travelers can look forward to having better access to information wherever and whenever they need it, as well as better web experiences that are getting more personalized every day.  

Since we launched TripIt Pro in July, we’ve been inundated with requests from travelers outside the U.S. who wanted to sign up for the service. While we’re sorry to make you wait, we’re happy to announce that TripIt Pro is now available worldwide in nearly every country! 

To thank travelers around the world for their patience, we’re offering the same charter membership special that we offered to U.S. travelers when we initially launched TripIt Pro. To take advantage of charter pricing, you need to have a billing address outside the U.S., sign up for TripIt Pro before Nov. 30, 2009 and enter promo code CHARTER when you sign up. By following these steps, you will lock in a lifetime charter member price of $49 a year. 

If you aren’t yet familiar with TripIt Pro, it’s a premium service that’s ideal for frequent travelers. It works in conjunction with our free TripIt service, with additional tools for extra convenience and peace of mind.