Interview with the Founder of TripIt, Gregg Brockway

January 11, 2008 · By Jens

I wrote about TripIt before on my blog, but at the recent PhoCusWright Conference in Orlando, I had an opportunity to talk to Gregg Brockway, co-founder and president of the Travel Planning website, and he was nice enough to answer some of my questions. Greg was also the co-founder of Hotwire, so has some extensive experience in building successful online travel ventures.

Here are some of his key points from our conversation:

- TripIt was started to make travel easier by helping travelers organize their travel plans and stay connected to their friends and colleagues. It’s cool because it’s incredibly easy and does much of the work automatically. You just forward all your travel confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com and TripIt automatically creates a master travel itinerary with your bookings plus maps, weather and more.

- Travel is now the largest e-commerce category, but you won’t find many people saying it’s easy to plan and book a trip. On the contrary, organizing a trip is confusing and time-consuming for many travelers, and that’s what we’re trying to address. We don’t care where travelers book, we just help them organize their travel plans.

- There is another “part” to what we’re doing which is to push our service beyond the browser and make the information in TripIt available to users in the applications and formats they user most. Some early examples of this are how we support iCalendar format to you can see your TripIt information in your Google calendar or Outlook 2007 as well as our new TripIt To Me mobile service.

- With our TripIt Friends network, we’re we make it easy to share travel info with your spouse, or see where all your friends and colleagues are traveling at any time. TripIt.com is a free service to consumers.

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Written by Jens · Filed Under Featured, Interviews, Jens