Here’s a funny anecdote from the past that was brought back to mind last week.
A few of us were chatting over dinner about how much we loved TripIt (@tripit), and I remembered a story from the AppsLab vaults.
I remain a true believer that we need more dead-simple email (and IM) interfaces into web services, which is why I’m a longtime fan of TripIt. People just can’t be bothered to try out this or that new service, and email isn’t going anywhere.
I’ll confess I haven’t used TripIt in years, but that’s really on me, not on them. TripIt really showcases simplicity as a feature; all you need to do is email your travel itinerary to their bot, which it parses and then uses to create a trip for you, complete with nice-to-haves like checkin, stuff to do at your destination, calendar files for import, etc.
Plus, there’s the social element, which alerts you when friends are nearby.
Anyway, way back when, I attended a session called “Making Email a Useful Web App” at Web 2.0 Expo, presented by TripIt co-founder, Andy Denmark (@adenmark), a great session that I thoroughly enjoyed.
Not long after, I blithely complained that TripIt didn’t fully support our corporate travel agent’s itineraries on a blog post of Andy’s. He politely offered to take a look.
I didn’t expect him to do anything, what with a fledgling company to run and all, but I emailed him copies of the itineraries, just for kicks. Not too long later, he replied and said they’d take a look and get it sorted later that week.
Sure enough, they did, and from then on, itineraries sent by our corporate travel agent worked perfectly, no fuss, no mess.
How awesome is that?
Great company, with great service at all levels.
So, if you work for Oracle and enjoy using TripIt to process and manage your itineraries, you owe Andy a big hug, virtually of course, for taking the time to listen to a whiney user.
