Stuck in the Middle with You

The first part of this week I was out in Los Angeles for the inaugural Magento Imagine eCommerce conference (more about that to come). En route, I ended up trying (via standby) to get on an early flight for one leg (ATL to LAX), and just got squeezed onto the flight as the last passenger.

This meant five hours plus in a middle seat in coach. Nothing to write home about — this certainly falls in the first-world-problems camp — just the average run-of-the-mill experience that makes traveling tiring.

The next day, I got this in my email:

Excellent, proactive customer service. Never got one of these before – maybe it only comes with a certain level of Medallion Status?

Not that 500 sky miles is going to make any significant difference (and never mind that of course on every full plane there are lots of folks in middle seats) but I thought it was quite clever to notice and simply acknowledge that the much heralded benefits of being a frequent flier didn’t apply in this case.

Good work Delta, and thanks for the aisle seat on the way home.

TripAdvisor joins the Private Travel Club Club

Trip Advisor's new invite-only travel offering

TripAdvisor is joining Jetsetter, Kayak, and TabletHotels (good summary here) to offer a private sales site for hotel accommodations with the interestingly named “snique.” (I realize they’re going for “sneak,” as in “sneak away on a trip” – but I can’t help but read it as a contraction of “is unique?” or a “snick” as in snicker).

Can TripAdvisor’s brand support the claim of exclusivity? I think we all know at this point that the “invite only” exclusivity of private-sales sites is really about promoting an image rather than keeping out the unwashed masses. If I got invited, as someone who’s rarely if ever really used TripAdvisor (despite travelling frequently), everyone is getting invited.

Clicking through the email invite (above) results in this signup screen:

Snique's Sign Up Options

I like the idea of offering Facebook based signup, though when I tried it all I got was a cryptic error:

Not a very useful error message

Also, given that this is an exclusive, invite-only, member drive site – shouldn’t they already know my email address, name, zip, etc? They knew that at TripAdvisor, in order to be able to send me the invite.

Doesn’t feel very exclusive to fill out such a sign up form. Ultimately, though, the proof of value will be in the deals – let’s see if they justify the brand.

Dear Dopplr

Dear Dopplr

While I’m very happy with your ability to share my trips with my friends, and I appreciate the semi-annual personal report, I need to share something with you.

I’m never going on a trip to Delta, Canada.

Read more…

Dopplr import fail

I use Dopplr and TripIt, to keep track of traveling colleagues, update people on my own travel, and just generally simplify life. (I’ve blogged about each many times as well: see posts containing dopplr or TripIt).

I’m getting tired of Dopplr’s consistent FAIL on a common (for me) use case- a one day trip to NY on Delta.

Whenever I forward such a confirmation here’s what Dopplr does:

Thanks for sending us a message by email.

We automatically created a trip to Atlanta, GA, United States (from Newburyport, MA, United States) between February 10th and February 13th

We won’t share coincidences from this newly-created trip with your fellow travellers until February 18th. This is to give you a chance to check and correct any problems in interpretation.

If you’d like to check, go to [link removed]

Yours sincerely,
The Dopplr Team.

The problem is, I’m not going to or from Atlanta – that’s where Delta airlines headquarters is, sure, but it’s a long detour on the Boston->New York route.

I’m also not travelling Feb 10 to Feb 13, I’m leaving and returning on the 13th, and the trip was booked on the 10th.

I can (and do) go in and manually fix the trip in Dopplr, but in this type of case TripIt’s import feature just works.

Dopplr gets Email, Twitter, SMS import

One of the more popular posts on this blog is the one which describes how to import trips from TripIt into Dopplr, in order to avoid the re-entry tax. After all, as I wrote in my comparison of the two services last October, TripIt‘s email import was the critical factor in my decision of how to manage this information:

Tripit’s mechanism for adding trips is superior. The ability to simply forward (or even set an automatic rule to forward) confirmation emails is a major step forward . . . Where TripIt seems better at pulling data in, Dopplr seems to be better so far at pushing their data out, or letting people pull it into other contexts.

Well, now Dopplr’s gone and added some new import mechanisms of their own. This post from the Dopplr blog (ok, it was posted back on July 8th, but it has been sitting in my queue to write about) lays out three new options: Twitter, SMS, and Email:

Today I’m really happy to say we’re taking the wraps off a number of new ways to get your future into Dopplr and share your travel information with those you trust: Dopplr by Twitter, SMS and… Email!

Although I love twitter as a notification service (a way of letting me know something relevant happened) I don’t see myself using it as a data input service. For those of you who would like to, just follow the dopplr user and send direct messages with your trips, like: d dopplr a trip to London July 28th to August 3rd. (Nicely, it also happily accepts @dopplr posts, in case you want to announce your trips as well as put them in dopplr). SMS is another option – you associate your SMS number with your Dopplr account and you can text message the same types of messages to Dopplr’s number.

Finally, they’ve got email working at trips@dopplr.com (wonder how many people will confuse plans@tripit.com with trips@dopplr.com – did they make plans@dopplr.com an alias?).

Interestingly, you can use the same kind of shorthand messages used for Twitter or SMS – “a trip to London July 28th to August 3rd” – or you can forward confirmation messages from booking services (which is how TripIt handles import). This is because Dopplr did not set out to parse all the complex formats used by different agencies, but took a simper approach, as explained by MattB:

There are an awful lot of ways to format a travel itinerary. When people asked us to extract trips from emails, we looked at our long history of e-tickets, confirmations and reservations, and scratched our heads.

Inspiration came in the shape of Apple’s last OS X release, Leopard, and an intriguing feature called “Data detectors“.

We realised that instead of creating a piece of code to decode every email format out there, we could look for patterns of dates and place names in the text (and later, other information too) and turn those into trips.

A happy side-effect of this approach is that as well as extracting information from automatic reservation emails, it works well with short text strings like “I’ll be in San Francisco from 3rd July to 7th July”. This means we can work with many hand-written emails, with Twitters, and with SMSes too.

Of course it won’t work with every variation under the sun (for example, it’s most reliable when an email contains just a return trip in a single hop), but we’ve had very satisfying results in our testing. And of course every email you send us will be added to our test suite so that our engine can get better and better over time.

In other words, rather than specifically targeting all the different potential formats, and parsing them in some structured way, Dopplr looks for some specific patterns in the text and tries to understand their meaning without knowing the format of the email in advance.

I wonder how different this is from what TripIt actually does behind the scenes – how much they plan for specific formats they know in advance – and how successful it will be “in the field.” For now it is enough to convince me to turn off my automated importing and give trips@dopplr.com a try on my next few confirm messages. Then, I can automate a rule in my email such that travel confirmations get auto-forwarded to both plans@tripit.com and trips@dopplr.com, and be sharing my travel plans painlessly.