Tripit is a travel organizer site that creates one’s itinerary by just forwarding their confirmation emails to them. I’ve met somepeople from Tripit during networking events in the Bay Area. When I would demo YowTRIP, Tripit was fresh on people’s mind, so I’d get feedback about its way of creating trips (simply by forwarding emails), and that i should think about doing something similar.

Well, I have always thought it was a great feature, but not necessarily the main focus and value proposition of YowTRIP. We’re not about planning and organizing your trips, but rather to share, invite and meet others to travel with. Therefore, you do need to physically enter more information about yourself to help find the optimal travel partner: photos, likes/dislikes, places visited, and travel plans (often times without reservations yet, so the forwarding email wouldn’t work). But it worked great for what Tripit was doing.

The idea of using email for entering information (not necessarily forwarding flight/hotel confirmation emails) has always been in the back of my mind for things such as YowCHATS replies, YowPHOTOS, YowTRIPS, YowGROUPS comments/replies.

Dopplr, the other big name in the online travel social network, has just release some alternative ways of entering trips: via Twitter, SMS, and email… Including allowing their users to forward their flight/hotel reservations. Definitely an easier way to add their trips, but I wonder how far they will go with trip organization aspect of it… Will Dopplr become a direct competitor of Tripit?

I’ve always thought there was a down side to this functionality (and I’m speculating here… I don’t know for a fact how active Tripit’s members are in terms of adding other information onto their profiles), but Dopplr might be risking having their members become less active, and not adding other info such as photos, suggestions, etc.

I used Tripit once the last time I went to Atlanta to see how well they’d build my master itinerary (and yes, I did like the service), but I had no incentive to add anything else to my profile (photo, about me, invite friends, place photos, etc) As I said, I don’t know if this happens a lot… Maybe it was just me, since I am already an active member of a better travel social network (aka YowTRIP )

Anyway, it’s good to know that there is still a lot of opportunity in this industry and nice to see these companies releasing new features… Even if we start borrowing ideas from each others. Plus, with the money those two raised, they better be thinking about new stuff (Tripit: $5.1M - Dopplr: $7M ?)

YowTRIP is looking for investment, by the way…