TripIt is awesome

Nice service. Back in 2002 we were doing something like this when I was consulting at Flytecomm. We would suck up people's trip confirmations and parse them (just a whole bunch of regexps in Perl) and spit out detailed information about the trip. Since we had real time flight information (since we had an FAA feed) we could match the reservation to flight legs and do cool stuff like realize your flight is going to be late arriving and that you are missing your connection; then we'd look up alternate flights and send you an SMS message with details. Happy days.

Is anyone (besides me) working on statistical mining of structured data from text? There are lots of cool developments in this area lately.

TripIt failed to recognized my itinerary (I suspect discount travel site screwup), but I just used YAPTA and their customer service has blown me away. They took my record locator and harassed the airline twice about getting me a refund in the space of 2 hours. _Every_ startup should blow their customers away like that.

It really is. My wife is a booking agent and this site has saved her a TON of time.

TripIt is on my mind today. First Joel, then I get a TripIt nalgene left over from TechCrunch 40. You've got a hold on me, TripIt.

I guess I'm the only one who's slightly worried about privacy issues here?

TripIt could be a nice orbitz acquistion

How do they make money, I wonder?