An injection of $7 million to the TripIt coffers is expected to spark a wave of new features to the service as the itinerary and trip planning marketplace becomes increasingly competitive.

The investment from Azure Capital Partners and O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures, TripIt’s third round, brings the total amount of external capital thrown into the business to $13.1 million.

TripIt officials say the latest wave will enable the company to launch new leisure and business-focused features to the Tripit system at a quicker rate.

The business has found itself having to compete with a number of new entities on the scene during 2009, including the emergence of Traxo and new tools from Kayak.

Marketing to consumers will be one of the other examples cited by TripIt as a result of the new investment as well as new distribution deals and partnerships.

An official says:

“[The] $7M validates our business model, and the round was oversubscribed, which shows significant investor interest in a pretty tough economy.”

WorldMate, which keys in on business travelers with its itinerary management service, claims it has trumped competitor TripIt’s LinkedIn capabilities with the launch of a WorldMate Blackberry app that enables users to find nearby LinkedIn connections or those in other cities.

WorldMate’s new LinkedIn features, available today, are accessible over the Web or through the mobile app, the company says.

The Palo Alto, Calif., company, which claims 5 million users of its personal travel assistant, says its integration with LinkedIn’s API enables users to:

• View nearby LinkedIn connections within their WorldMate itineraries;

• Peruse a mobile pop-up which displays their LinkedIn connections who are in the locale when they arrive; and

• Scan and contact connections in the destination.

The WorldMate website-LinkedIn integration looks like the following:

Among the burgeoning number of itinerary-management services, TripIt pioneered LinkedIn integation as TripIt users can display upcoming getaways and business trips, their current location and travel stats on their LinkedIn profiles. It looks like this:

However, in contrast to WorldMate’s new mobile app for LinkedIn, TripIt’s LinkedIn functionality currently is accesible only through LinkedIn over the Web.

Another week, another trip and itinerary management website announcement – this time with bragging rights going to TripIt which has launched its Blackberry app this week.

The company says the new app will be free and its launch follows testing around the user base for a few months.

The app joins TripIt’s existing products for the iPhone and Android platforms.

Similarly to the existing apps, TripIt on the Blackberry puts a traveller’s itinerary on on the handset, including travel confirmation emails from corporate booking sites and corporate travel agencies.

There is a sync function to put details into the BlackBerry calendar and, by extension, to the user’s existing Microsoft Outlook calendar.

The launch follows recent moves by fledgling rival Traxo, which is aggressively targeting a similar subset of travellers with its own range of tools and rhetoric.

But with mobile a key component of both services, ensuring the core functionality is available across as many platforms as possible appears to be a major focus for both companies.

“Traxo’s strategy is not to develop apps itself but to develop device agnostic apps with partners who already have mobile apps. Traxo plans on getting this accomplished in 2010,” a spokeswoman says.

Traxo, a trip planning and itinerary-managment website, integrated UpTake hotel, restaurant and attraction recommendations so they can be viewed on a Traxo trip details page alongside flights that consumers have booked.

At the same time, Traxo, which launched in August and competes with TripIt, TripCase and Kayak Trips, among others, redesigned its website and took a veiled poke at category leader TripIt.

Part of the new homepage branding reads: “Don’t trip over your trip details,” a likely reference to Traxo’s view that TripIt is clunky, in part because TripIt users must manually forward reservations confirmations and updates to TripIt to upload them into their itineraries. In contrast, Traxo users furnish Traxo with their supplier site user names and passwords and Traxo scrapes the supplier websites for travelers’ new bookings and updates.

Here’s the new Traxo homepage:

The redesign, with its tagline, “Traxo, Your Home Base for Travel,” and the additional messaging, “Automatically organize, manage and share your travel plans” and “Don’t trip over your trip details,”  is an attempt to reposition Traxo as more than an itinerary management and sharing service — which is how Traxo wants consumers to view its competitor, TripIt. Instead, Traxo wants its users to view Traxo as a broader service-provider that also helps with trip-planning, accessing previous itineraries, posting trip photos, playing on social networks and other services.

Hence the content integration with UpTake, which probes several thousand websites to help consumers come up with inspiring places to go based on their preferences. So, after consumers book their flights to Dallas, alongside their flight confirmation details on Traxo, they’ll now see hotels, attractions and restaurants that UpTake recommends for their trip. Consumers will get snippets of Uptake recommendations in their Traxo trip details page and click over to UpTake for the full low-down.

The Uptake integration into the Traxo trip details page looks like this:

Meanwhile, I asked Gregg Brockway, TripIt’s president and co-founder, about Traxo’s apparent jab at TripIt with the “Don’t trip over your trip details” line.

Brockway’s response was succinct and graphical. He sent me the following link to Compete, showing TripIt traffic in green and Traxo’s in blue.

Here’s the chart:

Travel planning and online concierge service TripIt is launching Facebook Connect functionality to allow members to share and create trips on the social network.

The tie-in works by posting a user’s trip information on Facebook and re-feeding responses back into the TripIt profile of a journey.

TripIt says the tool will also be useful for people to get “relevant and timely” advice which, in turn, will flow through the existing Tripit connections into mobile for on-the-move services and assistance.

Interestingly the launch is as a direct result of user demand for a connection between the two services and is one of most widely requested services of the year, TripIt says.

The development marks the end of a busy year for TripIt following the launch of suite of products, including most recently its Android app.

But more importantly the launch of Facebook Connect illustrates the growing desire by what were initially pre-trip planning services to integrate with platforms which are increasingly offering real-time functionality.

These links are also giving platforms such as TripIt a new distribution channel in terms of marketing to a wider audience.

TripIt introduced a free Android app, which enables travelers to view their itineraries; link to airlines, hotels and restaurants; and make calls directly from their itineraries in their Android devices.

TripIt already had, and recently upgraded, its iPhone app, and is testing a Blackberry app, which TripIt hopes to release before the end of 2009.

Soon TripIt, TripCase, Dopplr, Traxo and Kayak, among other companies with itinerary-management solutions, likely will be all over all of the mobile platforms.

Mobile apps are a high priority, but which devices/platforms to publish apps to probably isn’t the most pressing issue. After awhile, travel companies will get their apps out there to all of the key platforms.

However, one of the key issues for the TripIts and Traxos remains how travelers get their air and hotel booking details to the itinerary-management solution.

With Traxo, travelers must provide their user names and passwords for booking sites.

TripIt makes the traveler e-mail their booking confirmations. (Hey, it is better than having to fax them.)

TripCase, because it is tied to Sabre, enables the traveler to key in a record locator if the booking was made through Travelocity, lastminute.com or another Sabre-connected travel agency.

An easier solution is the distribution agreement that TripIt recently made with Expedia Inc.’s Hotwire, although it hasn’t been implemented yet. Hotwire bookers will be able to click a button on Hotwire.com to automatically send their itineraries to TripIt.

I met with Hugh Jones of Travelocity last week, and he hinted that Travelocity and TripCase would enter into a similar arrangement.

One of the issues here is that the booking site would have to use some resources to make the button happen, and there isn’t much advantage to doing so for the supplier website unless there is an attractive component to the commercial relationship between the two companies.

But, as a consumer, I would much prefer clicking a button to send my itinerary to one of the itinerary-management solutions than to furnish all of my supplier-website passwords to Traxo.

Then again, as much as I like social media, I have no great desire to share my flight numbers and schedules with the world.

If I want to let you know when and where I’m traveling, I’ll just tell you.

TripIt, the itinerary-management company, expanded its TripIt Pro premium service to support international mobile alerts, international billing and point-tracking for numerous loyalty programs outside the U.S.

As with the U.S. launch of TripIt Pro in the summer, non-U.S. subscribers to TripIt Pro can lock in a charter member rate at $49 per year if they sign on by the end of November, and renew annually at that rate.  If they subscribe later, the rate would be $69 per year.

TripIt co-founder and President Gregg Brockway says he was shocked at the volume of requests for the service that came from outside the U.S., and the international launch meets that need.

Supported airline loyalty programs now include: Air Canada Aero Plan, Air France Flying Blue, Alitalia MilleMiglia, Alaska Mileage Plan, American AAdvantage, BMI Diamond Club, British Airways Executive Club, Continental OnePass, Emirates Skywards, Frontier, Delta SkyMiles, Iberia Plus, JetBlue Airways TrueBlue, KLM Flying Blue, Lufthansa Miles and More, Mexicana Frequenta, New Zealand Airpoints, Northwest WorldPerks, Qantas Frequent Flyer, Southwest Rapid Rewards, TAP Air Portugal Victoria, United Mileage Plus, US Airways Dividend Miles, Virgin America Elevate, and Virgin Atlantic Flying Club.

Despite the move to expand loyalty program coverage to Europe and Asia-Pacific, Brockway says TripIt has no plans at this juncture to launch websites outside the U.S. That might come, he says, if TripIt decides to supports languages other than English.

Brockway acknowledges that there is a lot of competition these days in itinerary management, which he terms “the hottest part of the travel category.”

He says “long term it’s good” because competition brings more attention to itinerary management, much as the early brawls among the first online travel agencies helped draw notice and traffic.

Brockway characterizes Kayak’s recent entry into the field with Kayak Trips as “incredibly flattering.”

Flattering or not, new players and a more pressurized market will keep everyone on their toes.

Kayak undoubtedly has an unwelcome surprise for TripIt, Dopplr, Traxo and Sabre’s TripCase, among other contenders.

That’s because Kayak has quietly introduced in beta Kayak Trips, an itinerary-sharing service, to about half of its registered users. The service also is being tested on Kayak’s UK site and in France, Spain, Germany, Italy and India.

Kayak thus becomes the first metasearch engine to get into the post-reservations management game.

Consumers can forward their travel confirmations from airline, hotels, travel agencies and other suppliers to trips@kayak.com, where they will be turned into a master itinerary.

Kayak users can then share their travel plans with friends, associates and enemies by e-mail.

The elements of the itinerary can be added to a calendar, and users can append notes and add additional events.

Kayak, of course, doesn’t book any travel itself, but will be enabling travelers to aggregate their reservations from a panalopy of suppliers.

The company will be rolling out additional functionality for Kayak Trips before an announcement.

No word yet on the business model, but I wouldn’t be surprised if an ad or two appears in itineraries along the way.

In 2000, Roger Liew became employee No. 5 of Orbitz, the airline-owned website that was to launch the following year.

In the seemingly irrational world of travel technology, with its mainframe computers, EDIFACT messaging and incompatible legacy systems, Liew and the 14 other technophiles who became Orbitz’s first employees had a few things going for them in addition to their MIT degrees.

“Our advantage was that none of the early people knew anything about travel,” Liew recalls.

Today, Liew is vice president of technology at Orbitz Worldwide. He was detailing his circuitous travel-technology trek at, of all things, an Orbitz summit for bloggers this week at the company’s Chicago headquarters.

In the course of his multi-segment career tour, Liew landed at Orbitz in 2000 as a software guru, moved on about four years later and went to G2 SwitchWorks, and circled back to Orbitz Worldwide some eight months ago, around the time that Barney Harford took over as president and CEO.

Reflecting on the tech challenges he’s faced over the last decade, Liew, adhering to a venerable Chicago tradition, says he realizes he’s been on a mission.

“This doesn’t have to be as hard as it is,” Liew says, referring to the complexity of all those bits and bytes.

Clad in jeans and seemingly with a quip always at the ready, Liew seems a tad nostalgic when he reflects upon the early days at Orbitz.

Although Expedia and Travelocity had about a five-year head-start, Orbitz had some assets, Liew remembers.

“We had a boatload of money,” he boasts.

And, among the first purchases was about $5 million worth of application servers.

“The challenge was what to do with all the stuff that we’d bought,” Liew says.

However, it wasn’t all fun and games with those big budgets.

Liew says the team worked 100-hour weeks during the three months before the Orbitz launch in June 2001, and he recalls shop talk about the need to automate tooth-brushing functions.

The geek crew labored for part of the first year to ensure that the air-shopping engine from vendor ITA Software was functioning properly, Liew says.

“Some people were saying ITA doesn’t work,” Liew recalls, and there were pitched debates between Sabre, Orbitz and others over which air-shopping engine turned up the most useful, practical results.

Use of ITA was a key differentiator for Orbitz because unlike the flight-search engines used by its competitors, ITA went beyond the global distribution systems to gather data on flight combinations.

And, Orbitz soon was turning into an air-ticket machine, according to Liew.

At one point in the early days, Orbitz, which hosted back-end systems for American and Northwest Airlines in addition to selling flights on its own, was processing “more tickets than anyone else,” Liew claims.

Liew explains that the American Airlines system interfaced with Orbitz before touching the Sabre host system, and that technicians at the airline expressed a preference to discuss technical problems with the staff at Orbitz rather than with the Sabre team.

By 2004, the US Dept of Transportation deregulated the global distribution systems and Liew exited Orbitz along with employee No. 1, chief technology officer Alex Zoghlin, who was the first person to be hired.

On their new mission, Zoghlin, Liew and other Orbitz expatriates set out to build a new GDS from scratch at G2 SwitchWorks. Such a task had not been attempted since the 1980s and the project turned out to be much more difficult than envisioned, Liew says.

When G2 SwitchWorks would attempt to hook up with an airline, Liew says, G2 would realize that the airline generally would know that its system operated well enough, but the carrier often couldn’t explain know how its system worked.

“Each connection took about a year,” says Liew, who acknowledges that G2 ended up writing lots of code for airlines and travel agencies.

Faced with a full-court press from the GDSs and used as somewhat of a pawn by the airlines in their full-content negotiations of several years ago with Sabre, Amadeus, Galileo and Worldspan, G2’s GDS-creation scheme morphed into a scaled-down plan to build an alternate distribution system of sorts. Travelport bought G2’s assets in 2008 and today is using some of its technology for travel agency desktop development.

Back at Orbitz Worldwide now, Liew says the company wants to build on those earlier, daunting connectivity problems. Orbitz “ultimately” wants to open up its APIs to smaller companies to tap into their software-writing creativity, whether it is for mobile or other applications, he says.

Of course, Liew notes, Orbitz has to figure out the proper balance for such API access because queries into the Orbitz system come at a cost.

Liew’s discussion of opening Orbitz up to code-writers came on the same day that TripIt, the post-trip management firm, revealed that its developer network had gone live.

Liew notes that TripIt has one less hurdle to clear than Orbitz on this front: TripIt, he says, “doesn’t have to touch legacy systems.”

In contrast, for Orbitz, the fact that it must interface with old-school airline and travel-agency systems makes for much complexity and hassle.

And, drawing on his own legacy and experience in that regard, Employee No. 5 knows the challenges all too well.

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.”

In a short blog post Dopplr has this morning confirmed that its rumoured sale to Nokia has completed successfully. The announcement contains this line:

Nokia shares our vision of the Social Atlas, the idea that social location data can improve our experience of cities.

I am interested in this concept of the Social Atlas but best to leave the description to Dopplr themselves:

There are plenty of great sites out there where you can find subjective reviews and star-ratings of places round the world. We wanted to do something different, building lists of the best places ranked by everything that we know about the traveller.

Because of our existing community, we already know all sorts of things about our travellers’ habits – for example, we know who visits New York most often, and we know who lives in Europe. These “opinionated lists” would tell us things like where Europeans eat in Tokyo, or where frequent visitors to New York stay compared to people visiting for the first time.

Taking into account these sort of factors, we can build aggregated views based on the wisdom of particular crowds. It can be interesting to see “people who visit X also go to Y” statements.

Discovering a city starting with places you already know is a great way to improve your local knowledge, but what if you’re new to a city? The Social Atlas has another mechanism to help sort and sift the combined knowledge of Dopplr travellers. We calculate lists of places that aren’t just ordered by plain popularity, but take into account the travel experience and social interconnectedness of people who visit.

So it’s about the data. Interconnected data.

One of the challenges with Dopplr is that it relies heavily on the network effect. The network, collectively, becomes more useful the more people join. This is true of most social networks.

Cloud travel itineraries

Putting aside the specifics of Dopplr’s Social Atlas what their platform is really about is storing your travel itinerary in the cloud. Once the data is “out there” you can start to find interesting uses for it.

Dopplr are by no means alone when it comes to cloud based itinerary storage. TripIt for example is a strong category leader. The difference with TripIt is that the utility to a single traveller on a single trip is immediately obvious.

No need to keep pumping data into the cloud hoping that the hyped networked effect will kick in at some future point as you do with Dopplr.

Super PNR for direct bookings

Where I think we are going with cloud based itinerary storage is towards a Super PNR (Passenger Name Record) concept.

Imagine the future where travellers research and book directly online via a variety of supplier websites. At that point we need some glue (or perhaps a bucket) to store this itinerary data in one place.

Independent services, with access controls (eg perhaps using OpenID) could access that data and provide either personalised travel advice, latest transport news, suggest other products, give you coupon codes etc etc

Imagine an open eco-system of travel applications just like Facebook or iPhone applications all feeding and updating a central cloud hosted Super PNR.

Does this sound far fetched? Look at what Google have done with centralised records in Google Health. If you can do this with health records it can be achieved with travel records.

Sadly that isn’t what Dopplr were building. I don’t think that TripIt are building that either! The concept is too big for a startup…. an existing player who believes in direct bookings (rather than distributed bookings) is needed to put their weight (and money) behind it.

If this Cloud Super PNR existed then I expect Dopplr would have been one of the most successful applications  using it. But it doesn’t, so they aren’t…. but as with many entrepreneurial ideas the Dopplr concept has shown us the future…. just we collectively haven’t understood it yet.