TripIt, the itinerary management company, has entered into its first distribution relationship with an online travel agency, Hotwire.
Once the deal gets implemented in several months, Hotwire customers will be able to make a booking and click a button to automatically send their details to a TripIt itinerary.
It would replace the current system, where Hotwire users - and customers of any other travel-booking service - have to e-mail their confirmations to TripIt to aggregate their reservations.
In this wacky world of travel, think of the relationships at play here. Gregg Brockway, co-founder and president of TripIt, co-founded Hotwire in 2000. Hotwire is part of Expedia Inc.
Then there’s Sabre, which is a minority investor in TripIt.
But, curiously, you’ll notice that TripIt, which has relationships with BCD Travel, LinkedIn and Virgin America, among others, signed on Hotwire as its first OTA partner and not Sabre’s Travelocity.
Meanwhile, Sabre is hedging its bets in the trip-management sector. In addition to its stake in TripIt, Sabre has developed its own competing product, TripCase, available as a mobile app on Apple iPhones and Blackberrys.
Other than Travelocity, TripCase is one of Sabre’s first direct-to-consumer businesses. Incubated in Sabre Travel Studios, a successor to Sabre Labs which is focusing on mobile and social media apps, TripCase is beginning to market an advertising/messaging model for TripCase. [More on that below.]
I asked Brockway about the TripIt-Hotwire relationship.
“It’s not an advertising arrangement,” Brockway says. “There are several parts to the Hotwire partnership-value exchange. TripIt is providing TripIt Pro subscriptions to Hotwire’s high-value customers at an attractive rate. In addition, Hotwire is implementing an ‘Add to TripIt’ feature in several places to make it easy for Hotwire purchasers to choose to have their information automatically to their TripIt account.”
In general, TripIt earns its money through advertising, subscription revenue for premium products like TripIt Pro, and partnerships based on the TripIt API.
In tandem with announcing its Hotwire partnership, TripIt went live today with its Developer Referral Program. The company says some 250 developers have signed up for the program.
Under the program, developers can earn a revenue-share on TripIt Pro sales. TripIt Pro, which includes mobile alerts, information about alternate flights and frequent flyer tracking, currently sells for $69 per year.
On the mobile front, TripIt’s apps at m.tripit.com and the iPhone are free. Brockway says the goal is to acquire new customers, who hopefully will subscribe to TripIt Pro.
“Whether we continue that forever or with other platforms is an ongoing topic of conversation around here,” Brockway says.
Meanwhile, Sabre has been pursuing a dual strategy -- it invested in TripIt in 2008 and toward the end of that year it was well into developing its own mobile trip-management product, TripCase.
I wrote about Sabre’s strategy here, but have since learned some more.
John Samuel, executive vice president of Sabre Travel Studios, says the secret sauce in TripCase, is its advertising/messaging model.
TripCase, as a location-based service, would charge advertisers, which might be restaurants, travel agencies or others, fees to message travelers based on their itineraries, Samuel says.
A traveler might, who opted in to such messaging, might receive a message/ad from a restaurant as the traveler walked near it at an airport, for example, Samuel says.
Samuel says Sabre would ensure that the messages are relevant to the itinerary. “If we’re not [strict about it], customers won’t use the product,” he says.
Another key differentiator for TripCase is that travelers who book their trips from a Sabre-connected travel agency, including Travelocity, can input their itinerary simply by entering their record locator.
In contrast, most TripIt users have to e-mail their confirmations, and Traxo customers furnish their user names and passwords for supplier websites to Traxo, which searches the sites daily for confirmation updates.
Samuel says Sabre would like TripCase to be a “neutral or agnostic tool” regarding where travel is booked -- a development that would be a huge departure for Sabre.
In that vein, Sabre is talking to other parties, including perhaps a GDS or two, about importing their itinerary information into TripCase, Samuel says.
Samuel says Sabre is also trying to figure out how to position TripCase in relation to VirtuallyThere, the itinerary service that Sabre-connected agencies e-mail to their clients.
Samuel says there has been some talk in Sabre about melding TripCase and VirtuallyThere into one brand, but no decisions have been made.
So, what’s Sabre’s explanation for this dual TripIt-TripCase strategy? Is Sabre learning from TripIt so Sabre can refine its own product?
Samuel offers that the post-trip-management sphere makes for a huge opportunity.
“We didn’t view it as either/or,” Samuel says, referring to TripIt and TripCase. “There will be lots of services.”