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TripScope Provides Travelers an Integrated App to Make Vacation Planning Easy

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If you have ever been charged with putting together a girlfriend weekend, multi-generational family vacation or found yourself being asked to play travel agent, you may want to invite an app named TripScope along for the ride. Launched in January 2014 by a luxury travel advisor, who saw an opening for a comprehensive itinerary aggregator that wasn’t tied to a particular booking platform, Katelyn O’Shaughnessy says, the app has been used for over 25,000 itineraries. In November, the fledgling company of six made its mark when it was selected by Los Angeles-based accelerator Amplify to be part of businesses it invests in, mentors and showcases to venture capitalists for additional funding.

While the principal audience for TripScope has been retailers so far, accounting for over 80 percent of its transactions, consumers who have stumbled on to the app have encouraged the co-founder and CEO to expand her vision. The app already provides consumers the ability to select specialist retailers, and the former travel agent encourages users to include agents in the loop. For example, if there is an air controllers strike in France, your travel agent changes your flights and updates everything in your itinerary in real-time. You can keep track on your smartphone as you sip Pinot Grigio on the beach in Sardinia.

That said, the app has a big consumer angle at well, particularly since the fee per itinerary fee is a mere ten dollars, and a large percentage of the population likes to do their own travel planning. After going to its website and paying, the user gets an ID number that represents the itinerary. Anyone you want involved in the trip, as a participant or who needs to stay in the loop, can access the itinerary. As you finalize airline flights and hotels, it enables all of the information to be populated into an itinerary in real-time, and all of the people involved in the trip (your friends and family who are counting on you not to screw up) can see what you are doing. It even enables everyone to tap into over 2,000 hotel reviews by travel agents and travel writers from Travel42, a website owned by Northstar Travel Media. Moreover, it allows users, during the planning process or even during the trip, to search for things to do such as luxury shopping or shopping at flea markets, romantic excursions or places to keep teenagers occupied. If you or somebody in your party is a vegan, it will enable a filtered search of just vegan restaurants in Paris. If you or a friend want to reference any other online guide, it enables you to link, populate and share that information. Trip participants can chat back and forth similarly to Facebook messenger. So for example, if you propose a specific flight, the rest of your travel gang can say, "Yay" or "Nay."

TripScope is “agnostic” when it comes to how you want to book, so if you want to use an online travel agency or a supplier website, you can do either, and the information populates into your itinerary. It even works with sites such as Airbnb.

O’Shaughnessy says, she began to see the consumer side appeal during the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, when executive assistants started using the app to help their bosses keep track of ever changing meetings schedules. She notes that you can import LinkedIn profiles to get the quick overview on who you will be seeing. On the vacation side, she notes that the app’s photo album feature enables you to create a map with the locations where you took those great shots. As we increasingly live our lives for the world to see, TripScope features the ability to share all of your most memorable moments in your social media of choice.

A good example of where TripScope would be helpful, the CEO says, is a multi-generational vacation where there are kids in college, a girlfriend coming along, the grandparents and so forth, all spread across the country. Being able to give everyone access to the trip planning in real-time is a game changer, she says. It also enables those not going along to keep up with what you are doing.

While consumers are a lucrative growth market, O’Shaughnessy says within months she will be launching a “live agent” feature into deals she has worked out with the websites of travel magazine publishers. If you are reading a story on castles in Germany, at the end of an article, you will be prompted to speak to an expert agent who knows the best castles to visit, and using TripScope can help you plan your trip, which for most of us is probably the best suggestion anyway.