TripIt

Reverse Time Machine: Visualizing a Year Of Travel Data

By Cemre Güngör

Most of the apps on TripIt’s open platform assist you with your upcoming or current trips. However, I discovered a reflective benefit to using TripIt: you create a physical record of where in the world you have been. 

So as my final thesis project at NYU's Brooklyn Experimental Media Center, I experimented with visualizing data from TripIt to look back at my own (and other people's) travel history. 

I thought creating a physical object would let the data expose itself in very interesting ways. 

While I started off with visualizing itineraries on a map, I quickly realized that plotting flights on a map wasn't translating to something that had emotional impact. 

So I started looking into what makes trips memorable. 

I abandoned the map in favor of an abstract representation that shows each trip in relative locations to home, and depicted their length and purpose.

 

 

I built my final object by laser cutting, painting and stacking plates of acrylic. 

While it is fun to examine and attractive to look at, for the person it is made for, it functions as a reverse time machine, reminding her of one year of travels.

 

To get your trip data visualized by Cemre, visit http://cem.re/tripit/.

TripIt for Business: Bringing Office Travel into the 21st Century

When we created TripIt for Business, we took the same TripIt technology you’ve come to rely on for organizing all your plans in one place, and used it to make office travel easier for travelers, travel coordinators and colleagues.

For better or for worse, a lot of companies are still dealing with unnecessary headaches related to office travel. If the scene below feels all too familiar, you may want to pass this along to your boss.

Today, we’re going a step further by helping managers understand how much travel is on the books, and learn money-saving tips from the company’s road warriors. By accessing real-time spending data in TripIt for Business, you can quickly get answers about how much has been spent on travel this year, what travel spend will be in the next 30 or 90 days, and who the most frequent and efficient travelers are. 

And you get all this great data even if you don’t book all your travel in one place. Freedom to book where you want, plus the intelligence you need to run your business – that’s TripIt for Business.

Perhaps you or someone in your company treks to the same cities over and over? That’s a wealth of knowledge on how to get the most bang for your travel buck. Here are some of my money-saving tips:

Battle Hymn of a Frugal Business Traveler

• Keep calm and carry on: travel lighter to save a buck (bonus tip: volunteer to check for free at the gate if they need more room)
• Avoid hidden fees: hit the ATM before you get on the road, or in a cab
• Skip the taxi line: check to see if your hotel has an airport shuttle
• Built-in meals: look for business-friendly hotels that offer free continental breakfast (and a newspaper, to boot)
• Surf for free: many hotels and airports offer free wi-fi - $20 daily fees are so 2002

What are your business travel tips and tricks? Go to http://facebook.com/TripItforBusiness to participate in our Facebook poll.

Keeping Tabs on Travel: TripIt Now Available on the Samsung GALAXY Tab

Live from CES, TripIt is making its debut on the Samsung GALAXY TAB 10.1 and 7.0 Plus. So no matter what kind of hot new tablet you got for the holidays (or perhaps, pre-holiday splurge?) you can easily organize and view trip plans. 

What’s new with Samsung Apps? Itinerary-driven maps and the ability to view multiple layers of travel details - including air, car, hotel and more - all in one place. Here’s more detail:

Trip Details Organized for Flexible Viewing

You can view your itineraries in two layers at all times, which makes it easy to dive into details like confirmation numbers or seat assignments, while maintaining an eye on the full trip schedule. The other option is to view a list of all trips, alongside a single itinerary overview. Also, new with TripIt for Samsung GALAXY Tab devices is the ability to view a list of all trips in landscape or portrait mode.

Enhanced Maps Make it Easy to Navigate Trips Geographically

Now, you can dynamically view and navigate maps, directly from the itinerary. For example, when you select a flight, the airport location will light up on the map, and you can choose to get directions.

We realize you prefer native apps, so we’re excited to add Samsung’s hot new tablets to our growing family of smartphone and tablet apps. 

Did you recently join the world of tablets? Let us know how your tablet of choice improves life on the road, in the comments section below.

 

Quite a Journey: Looking Back at 2011

It's been quite a year. Before 2012 kicks into full gear, we wanted to take a moment to look back and celebrate the most recent leg of our journey together...

Collectively, you've traveled more than 5 billion miles! That's more than double the miles logged last year. Thanks for taking us with you, and providing suggestions from the road. We love hearing from you - and we celebrate the victories you share @TripIt or on Facebook, whether it's dollars earned back on airfare with TripIt Pro, or when you get the last seat on an alternate flight. 

This year we welcomed fresh new faces to the TripIt team, and there's room for more (check out our open positions here). We even had our first Hack Day! And the team was very busy this year...

We launched the iPad and Windows Phone apps, gave the Android and iPhone apps design refreshes, and joined the Amazon app store and Kindle Fire in December. There's more to come in January, so all those recently unwrapped tablets will be able to download TripIt in no time.

In October, we announced an exciting partnership with Avis to make booking a rental car even easier in less clicks. We're also helping power the new Frommer's Remix by HP. Putting itinerary data to work for you is an idea that we'll continue to bring to life with the 1,200 developers now using our open platform.

Joining Concur in January opened the door for exciting new features and partnerships. In June, we made it easy for TripIt users to automatically create an itinerary any time they book travel through Concur, and for TripIt Pro itineraries to feed expense reports in Concur. Companies of all sizes now have endless options to organize travel and expenses, seamlessly.

TripIt for Business really started to take off this year with a convenient way to see who's in or out of the office - and it's about to get really interesting in early 2012. We also introduced trip sharing through Salesforce Chatter and Yammer, as another way to keep colleagues in the loop.

One of the biggest highlights of the year was winning our first Webby Award. We were delighted to be recognized among top innovators in tech, and also later within the travel industry, when we received honors from Travel Weekly's Magellan Awards and the Telegraph Travel Awards.

It really is an exciting time to be a traveler, and we can't wait to show you what we have up our sleeves for 2012. 

Cheers,

Gregg, Scott, Andy and the TripIt team

 

5 Billion Miles Traveled with TripIt in 2011

There's no place like home for the holidays, but it sure took a long time to get here. Collectively, TripIt users have logged more than 5 billion miles with TripIt in 2011. That's the equivalent of a round trip to Pluto! See the infographic below for more fun facts.

Have you checked to see how many miles you've traveled this year? When you log into TripIt, scroll down to the bottom of the page where it says "full stats" and tweet @TripIt to tell us how far away you've roamed.

Speaking of fives, we're offering $5 off the gift of TripIt Pro for the holidays, to bring peace to the next billions of miles traveled. Grab it before it melts away and let it Pro, let it Pro, let it Pro. Cheers!

Grab the embed code here.