TripIt says it became the first travel company to integrate its services with Gmail and Google Apps email accounts for individual users.

Using a secure protocol, OAuth, which is an open standard to enable API authorization, users with Gmail and TripIt accounts can log onto TripIt and click an Start Auto Import button to authorize TripIt to import their travel-itinerary confirmations automatically instead of having to email them manually to TripIt.

TripIt’s integration of Gmail and Google Apps is in beta. It is an opt-in program and users can sever their Trip-It-Gmail tie-in at any time, TripIt says.

“Many TripIt travelers have set up email filters to automatically forward all their travel booking emails to plans@tripit.com,” according to the TripIt Blog. “That works okay, but setting up the filters you’d need is complicated. And once you have them set up, important plans still fall through the cracks. We’ve always thought there’s got to be a better way.”

A TripIt spokeswoman adds: “No more forgotten or missed emails.  You can be ‘in the air’ now, literally, and we’ll pull the confirmations, update your itinerary, and when you land — it’s all there on your phone.  We monitor and check your inbox for travel confirms and do the work for you.”

Getting access to travelers’ itineraries has been a sticky issue for itinerary management companies such as TripIt.

The company, founded in 2006, has struck several deals with the likes of BCD Travel, Orbitz for Business and Cornerstone Information Systems, where clients’ booking data can automatically populate travelers’ TripIt itineraries.

Until now, other travelers have had to manually email each confirmation or itinerary change to plans@tripit.com.

Traxo, a TripIt competitor, chose to resolve the issue by getting permission to access travelers’ user names and passwords for airline websites, and then to scrape the sites periodically to retrieve travelers’ itineraries.

But, for individual TripIt users who use Gmail, the Gmail-TripIt integration, if privacy and security safeguards work, would seemingly resolve the issue of having to manually email each confirmation to TripIt to keep travel itineraries and trip changes up to date.

The TripIt blog says when it accesses Gmail it only imports your travel plans. And, users can choose to have their confirmations automatically flow into their TripIt itineraries or aggregate them into an Unfiled Items folder in their TripIt account for later sorting.

TripIt plans on soon introducing similar auto-import features for other email services, as well.

Itinerary-management service TripIt partnered with Orbitz for Business and separately bundled a couple of products to offer a new pricing option aimed at businesses without managed-travel programs.

In other words, TripIt wants to show that it is focusing on the business — and not just the leisure — travel markets.

Orbitz for Business, the corporate wing of Orbitz Worldwide, says it became the first online travel company to integrate its corporate bookings with TripIt.

Several travel management companies, such as BCD, and clients of Cornerstone Information Systems already flow their booking data through TripIt.

Under the deal, Orbitz for Business clients can choose to give their employees the option of syncing bookings they’ve made through Orbitz for Business with the TripIt itinerary management service.

Here’s what the adding TripIt option looks like within the Orbitz for Business booking tool:

“So, it’s no surprise that many Orbitz for Business travelers have been using TripIt independently for years,” says Scott Hintz, TripIt co-founder and vice president for business development. “Now we are excited to integrate more closely to make the TripIt experience even better for our mutual customers, and to extend our service more broadly iwithin the Orbitz for Business client base.”

So, Orbitz for Business travelers would no longer have to email Orbitz for Business reservations to TripIt as they would automatically sync with their TripIt itineraries. The service is available immediately, the companies say.

Frank Petito, president of Orbitz for Business, says the TripIt deal highlights the way in which Orbitz for Business seeks to give travelers the tools they expect to be available when booking leisure travel, although the company layers those features with analytics tools that give the “CFO and procurement people”  what they need, as well.

In addition, Orbitz for Business customers would get access to standard TripIt tools such as maps, directions, seating advice and online check-in, which are available through TripIt.com, mobile site m.tripit.com as well as TripIt’s Android, iPhone and Blackberry apps.

In other news, TripIt unveiled TripIt for Business, which starts at $399 per year.

TripIt for Business is a bundling of TripIt Groups, a free service when enables employees at a company to share their travel plans companywide, and TripIt Pro,  a subscription service which offers flight-alert notifications, information about alternative flights and rewards-point tracking, among its features.

With TripIt for Business, companies get enhanced TripIt Groups features — such as the ability to designate an administrator and to create subgroups — as well as TripIt Pro, which is currently being offered for $49 per year per person.

For the $399 per year TripIt for Business annual fee, companies get TripIt Groups plus 10 subscriptions to TripIt Pro for employees. The fee structure escalates based on the number of TripIt Pro subscriptions needed.

Cornerstone Information Systems, which provides reservation management services to travel management companies, integrated TripIt and its itinerary management services as a “turnkey” solution for Cornerstone clients.

Two Cornerstone clients, TravelStore and World Travel Service, already are providing their clients with TripIt services through the Cornerstone integration, Cornerstone says.

“Clients using Cornerstone’s ICQX reservation management and fulfillment platform can now ‘flip a switch’ to have their travel booking data flow seamlessly into the TripIt platform, including automatic synchronization of itinerary changes,” Cornerstone states.

Cornerstone says its TripIt integration is “unique” because it provides TripIt with access to all of the agency’s booking data, regardless if reservations are made at the travel agency or online. The data also flows regardless of the agency’s GDS affiliation or booking-tool choice, Cornerstone says.

Cornerstone it accomplished the tie-in with TripIt by integrating Cornerstone’s Web Services with TripIt’s API.

Wido Schaefer, the CEO of TravelStore, states that hooking up with TripIt through Cornerstone required minimal development work and adds value for its clients.

Blackberry users on mobile trip manager Worldmate will be the first on the system to have their emails automatically scanned for travel bookings.

Worldmate has developed an opt-in tool called TripCatch which monitors email communication so that whenever an email with a travel booking confirmation pops into the inbox the user’s itinerary is automatically updated.

TripCatch will screen for flights, hotels and car hire bookings to add to the user’s existing Worldmate trip planning system.

Worldmate says the system will only add information from an email account once the user is prompted.

The idea is to ease the existing itinerary management process associated with Worldmate and other mobile services such as TripIt by adding an automated element into the system.

If their companies let them, business travelers using the latest version of TRX’s corporate-booking tool, RESX, can book their trips and then share them on TripIt and Facebook.

After making a booking using RESX, travelers would get prompted — if their companies enable the feature — to share trips with their TripIt and Facebook networks.

Then again, perhaps company A won’t want parts of the TripIt network to find out that its business development officer is traveling to company B for fear that someone in company C might find out.

But, that’s another story.

TRX plans to add other social-networking functionality soon as vice president of product development David Jackson, adds: “Embracing these and other traveler empowering technologies is the next logical step for corporate booking solutions given the widespread and growing use for social applications.”

The social networking twist is just one of the new features in the souped up RESX v9.12.

TRX says the user interface, navigation, controls and messaging also have been enhanced.

For example, three new sections — My Trips, Bulletin Board and My Dashboard — have been given prominent display space. So has an older feature, My Messages, which previously wasn’t allocated such prominent real estate.

At sign-in, My Messages displays notifications about expiring credit cards, passports and passwords, for example.

My Dashboard is geared for corporate travel planners and administrators and it provides a bunch of reporting capabilities.

Travelport has reached a deal with mobile travel services provider Worldmate, completing the GDS world’s rapidly expanding moves into the mobile world.

Worldmate will provide travel management companies in the US and Canada on the Galileo and Worldspan system a platform for customers to so they can manage itineraries via a handset, receive flight alerts and browse maps.

Users will also be able to share itineraries with colleagues  and business contacts as well as access the LinkedIn system and their own travel consultant.

Travelport says the service will initially be available only on Blackberry devices but there are plans to extend to Worldmate’s existing products on the Apple iPhone and Nokia handsets.

An official says although a number of companies were screened to provide a service, Worldmate’s agreement is not exclusive and the decision to partner with it was “based on features and functionality to meet the needs of our TMCs”.

“We continue to look at multiple companies in the mobile space since the future landscape is still very fluid.”

Travelport’s deal with Worldmate finally puts it alongside rivals Amadeus and Sabre with a major mobile offering for customers, although it will be used initially as a private label system through TMCs.

Indeed, Worldmate stated its aim to work closer with the GDS sector when it shifted its senior management team around in February 2010.

However, Sabre’s Tripcase and the Amadeus app (launched in March 2010) are different in that both GDSs are making a direct play to the consumer market.

TripIt says more than 10,000 companies have signed up for TripIt Groups.

With TripIt Groups, fellow employees can track the travels of their colleagues on their company’s travel map and sort out where they cross paths, for example.

TripIt launched its groups products three months so there has been significant uptake for the new, free service.

TripIt says small- and medium-size technology companies have particularly taken to TripIt Groups.

Examples include Eventbrite, Adaptive Path and Boxee.tv.

TripIt says TripIt Groups is its first step toward delivering additional services to companies of varying sizes.

BCD Travel has taken to YouTube to let clients know about the advantages of using TripIt to organize their trips.

Here’s the YouTube video, which is probably a couple of minutes too long.

BCD Travel selected TripIt for itinerary management last year and this video takes a poke at business travelers who choose to stick with the old way of doing things.

Hopefully, “Michael,” the road warrior in the video who likes to track his trips by pinning up yarn from destination to destination on his office map, will learn, as the video puts it, to “evolve.”

It’s interesting, too, that a large travel management company sees YouTube as a means of informing clients about new tech products.

Two years ago I wrote a blog post outlining the developments I would make if I were responsible for Google’s travel industry strategy.

With the speculation that Google is in negotiations to buy ITA Software (the system behind many leading flight meta search sites), I thought it was time to revisit that article and see whether I was right or not, and what I would advise now.

In May 2008, I speculated that Google should work around three key themes:

1. Owning the traveller profile
2. Increasing content that can have adverts served against them
3. Product metasearch

Owning the traveller profile

• In the last two years  TripIt, Traxo and TripCase et al have begun to dominate this sector. They provide tools to centralise, organise, manage and share travel plans over multiple suppliers and trips. Nothing like this announced by Google in last twoyears.

Increasing content (and advertising opportunities)

• Okay, a fairly obvious strategic prediction, but in September 2009 Google announced Place Pages – a page for each city/destination pulling together content from a variety of Google owned sources. Looks like I got that right.

A method to implement tour product metasearch with a standard data format

• I wanted Google to define a basic travel standard that could be used to build a tour/activity metasearch. They have a standard (travel packages in Google Base) but it is not widely adopted or known about.

So, I scored 1.5 out of three with my last strategic speculation.

But with Google taking much more interest in the travel industry, what would I suggest now? Indeed, what could be some of the options available to Google?

1. Owning the traveller profile

There is still an opportunity here for Google or at least a reason to be playing in this particular game. Imagine what would happen if Facebook (with their new penchant for sharing profile data) decided that high value travel data was useful to aggregate.

It would give them a massive advertiser opportunity. Google need to be in this sector if not for any other reason than to defend against potential Facebook evolutions.

2. Supplier centric models

The lens to look at strategic options should either be user centric (i.e. the traveller profile) or supplier centric. Travel ecommerce conferences are dominated by middle layer companies (metasearch/online travel agents) so if you only go to travel industry conferences you could easily begin to believe that this is what makes up the online leisure travel industry.

Consumers like to deal with suppliers directly (if multiple transactions can be pulled together into a single service using something like a centrally maintained traveller profile) and the new Google travel should support this supplier centric model. Suppliers include airlines, hotels, car hire companies and inbound tour operators. From a web perspective suppliers exclude meta-search, online travel agents and out bound tour operators without local operations.

Airline strategy:

• Yes – buy ITA. Use it to send customer traffic from the Google website to transact on the individual airline websites. Pull the transaction details back to the centre using a single traveller profile.
• Completely removes the online travel agent/flight metasearch layer.
• The product data source is ITA’s existing sources.

Hotel strategy:

• Move the pay per click advertising model to an individual bidding market per hotel. i.e. rather than companies bidding on keywords they bid around a known (unique) hotel. (Google already has this hotel data).
• Firstly, this brings supplier direct transactions up the list (as the end point suppliers are most likely to be able to bid the highest on their own properties). Secondly by moving the market model to be based on hotels rather than on keywords this assists mobile transactions where users are not typing in keywords but searching by geography or location.
• Again, like airlines, use the centrally managed traveller profile system to bring all transactions together into an entire trip – replacing the need for an agent to do the packaging.
• In this case the product data source are hotel advertisers.

Tour/activity strategy:

Products such as tours and activities, for leisure travel at least, are often the driving reason to travel in the first place. Three key aspects Google could also adopt.

• Travel product data standard
• Bring in CPA alongside CPC advertising
• Permit tours/activities to be paid for using Google Checkout

4. Travel product data standard

The existing Google travel package data standard is sufficient. Let’s get that data more widely used within the Google system. It is not trivial to create but it is possible for SME / SMB enterprises to create tour/activity data to this standard using basic data tools.

Tours/activities are the travel products that work the most like conventional ecommerce products (i.e. they have a single price and are available year round or at least within a season start/end date range). Hence product search can be much more about searching product attributes than about searching available dates (like for flights/hotels).

A few small developments on the existing Google shopping search would produce a tour/activity search quite easily and sit nicely alongside flight search functionality delivered by an ITA acquisition.

5. CPA advertising alongside CPC advertising

Google does have an affiliate marketing network, yet it is not well utilised within travel. CPA will really help day tour/activity companies work with Google as currently they compete selling their $150 half-day tours with companies selling a seven-day holiday to the same destination.

When two distinct product types battle on the same keywords then the one with the largest profit margin per click will win. Currently tour operators selling holidays (not necessarily the end supplier) ends up gaining from this and activity companies are unable to compete fairly.

To truly go supplier-centric, the CPA affiliate advertising will have to be more accessible for small travel companies.

6. Google Checkout

Google Checkout (the payment system that Google operate) excludes travel products. By permitting payments for travel products in Checkout, Google will be able to operate a CPA advertising model to much greater effect (as they will know that a transaction has taken place as they can see the money)

So what happens now?

I promise to write another post in two years with an update on whether Google has taken my advice. If the search giant follows this set of predictions by a degree of 50%, like it did last time, we are in for interesting times!

NB: If you are NOT Google (!) but want tips on running your travel ecommerce business, then read 55 Travel Ecommerce Tips, a free e-book published in April 2010.

The future of online travel is that the industry is moving from a transaction fulfilment model to platforms, systems, content and technology that cover the whole spectrum of the travel cycle/funnel/bow tie.

This is to incorporate inspiration, recommendation and discovery into the online consumer experience as much as transactions.

After 15 years of online travel being about online transactions, we are moving from answering closed questions (“How much for a ticket to New York?”) to answering open ones (“Where should I go next?”).

For consumers to get an answer to an open-ended question it will be necessary for them to use a booking or query widget that does not require the customer to know where they are going.

To start the online travel process from a search box based around something other than selecting a date and destination (the traditional online travel agent starting point).

In the last year I have met a number of startups and mature companies building, launching and promoting travel sites exploring this area. And through this I have spotted four approaches to non-destination base search.

1. Drag, click, build and recommend from as many sites as you like

The use of plug-ins or apps to build up a trip idea, notion, inspiration and plan without actually having an engine at all.  By just dragging ideas from a site to a planning product.

Add links, add comments, add thoughts, share with others and build up from a broad notion to a detailed plan.

Gliider is very active in this space. They have a tool for collecting, collating and sharing travel plans using a plug-in that follows you while you surf.  It has taken search off one site and allowed all sites to be used in one experience.

2. Multi-click criteria selection

Using something other than a destination but still requiring a click and selection.  Instead of clicking on a destination these sites are getting consumers to start the inspiration or shopping experience using different criteria like:

• Date – Joobili wants a date first, eses the time period you want to travel in as the starting point for trip inspiration (Joobili founder interview);
• Experience ranking/rating – Asking consumers to rank in some sort of order a traveller’s holiday activity preferences. Triporati wants consumers to start with a stack ranking of up to 64 interests.  Tripbase is trying a different angle with a slider on five variables.
• Price – the ability to search based on budget first is being talked about but we have not see it. Planetism (Alpha presenter at the PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit in 2009) is still just a static page. Cost4travel has launched and I am expecting more sites to emerge in this area.
• Images – Hotels.com have been trialling their hotel visualiser were search starts with pictures and images (Alex Bainbridge has some detail).

3. Organisation and history first

Instead of starting with a search box, in this category sites start with the bookings already made by travellers.

Providing travellers a service for collating and storing all the bookings made on various sites. Currently this is being used to provide a travel management service and social networking space.

In time, this will expand to a recommendation service as players in this space collect more and more historical information about traveller behaviour – opening up a powerful data mining and merchandising resource.

TripIt is the first in this space and a tool I used with every trip (product review). A place to store and share all travel information with tracking and sharing tools.

Traxo has entered this space focused more in the leisure sector by building login in links to the major OTA customer information screens.

Allowing them to access a traveller’s account details directly from the OTA. Nokia’s Dopplr is coming from a more networking and “where are my contacts” approach but they too are collecting historical information about a traveller’s habits and desires. Tripcase scored a lucky break in this tight start-up battle when they made their way into iPhone app advertising.

While none of these sites are aggressively moving into the recommendation space – it is only a matter of time before they use the collected data for directing consumers to purchase paths.

4. No search – just a push

The latest version of non-date or non-destinational search sites are those with no search at all.  Sites with no mechanism for conducting any form of search of investigation.  Just a limited list of deals targeted at a select user group.

Playing on the strength of the user base and the ability of the company to select the right deals for the user base.

Biggest example is the Gilt-backed Jetsetter (interview with CEO). Start-ups are emerging regularly in this are. I have an example even closer to (my) home when some ex-Orbitz staff recently launched BonVoyou.

It is far too soon to call the death of the date and destination based search interface but there is a lot of venture money and start-up energy being spent on finding a new way to search for travel results.

This entrepreneurial push is evidence of the emerging desire from consumers for exploring new ways of exploring different areas of the inspiration, research and purchase funnels.

I predict we will see this start to change the UI, design and flow of the OTAs as they seek to chase this consumer desire and fight off the start up response.

Any other search approaches or companies you have noticed that are trying non-destinational search?