Employees make mistakes. Heck, even CEOs make mistakes – the difference is in how one reacts when they happen. Hopefully “Thomas” will be more careful in the future – not in the sense of hiding his identity more fully but in the sense of just being honest about the position from which he writes.

That comment by our employee is inappropriate and we apologize to John, Open Parenthesis readers, and our friends at Dopplr for it. Our policy at TripIt is for all of our employees, contractors, and other affiliated parties to fully and honestly disclose their identity when posting comments like this online. In addition, we agree it is poor form to make negative comments about other companies who operate in our market segment. The comment does not reflect the opinions of TripIt. Both Dopplr and TripIt are focused on helping travelers, and there’s just no value in making negative comments that don’t ultimately benefit the people who we’re trying to help. We respect the Dopplr team and what they’re doing to promote travel social networking.

Please know that we’ve taken corrective action to ensure this doesn’t happen again. And, once again, please accept our sincerest apologies.

I tried to contact “Thomas” to ask him to disclose his relationship to the company but he did not respond. Not sure if that was because the email address he supplied was fake?

I’ve blogged about the issue (posting comments on blogs without disclosing your company affiliation) in a separate post.

In contrast, most of these work “out of the box” with TripIt. And when I complained about my travel agent not being supported, they added it within a day.

What’s more, is that I don’t really want to “discover” people I do not know on a trip. All I’ve been wanting to do is to manage my business travels better and inform my family. TripIt fits that bill perfectly.

So, I don’t really find Dopplr very useful. My two cents.

Thanks for the nice write-up though.

Best,
Thomas