TripIt brings its headache-saving team-travel planning to iPhone and iPad

For frequent travelers, TripIt’s apps can be life-saving.

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The company pulls together all of your travel documents into one place — things like your flight itineraries and hotel confirmations — so you’re never left fumbling while you’re supposed to be enjoying your vacation. And its premium features, like instant alerts for flight changes and new available seating, can make traveling even more seamless.

Now the company is bringing TripIt for Teams, its solution for groups and organizations, to mobile for the first time on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. It brings together all of TripIt’s premium features with the ability to track where everyone on your team is traveling, and it also gives your company’s travel planner a way to keep track of all the moving pieces from their mobile devices.

TripIt also sees the teams feature as a great way to strengthen social connections within your company: “People travel to make connections … . What we look at is helping to facilitate those connections,” said Edith Harbaugh, TripIt’s product manager and the leader of the teams feature, in an interview with VentureBeat.

For example, if you’re traveling to New York City and someone else from your company is already there on a business trip, TripIt for Teams will alert you. It can be particularly useful for big organizations, where it’s tough to keep track of everyone’s travel plans.

TripIt has apps on just about every mobile platform (so far the teams feature is only on iOS), and it claims to have more than 8 million users.

TripIt was acquired by the travel-management company Concur back in 2011 for around $120 million. As Harbaugh tells it, the deal gave TripIt the best of both worlds: It now has the backing of a large company along with all of the resources necessary to scale its apps, and TripIt can also focus more on its consumer products rather than worry about the state of its business.

Concur also recently announced a $150 million Concur Perfect Trip Fund, which will support interesting travel-related startups.

Looking forward, Harbaugh tells me TripIt is focused on going even deeper into trip planning and helping teams with all of their travels. In particular, the company is exploring ways to track things that don’t send you a confirmation email, which has so far been TripIt’s primary method of organizing your travel info.

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