Travel organiser apps that extract reservations from emails to build an itinerary are useful for travellers but could also be a threat to some business models, writes Andrew Hennigan

Often written off as nearly dead, email has managed to survive 40 years and is showing no sign of disappearing. But the way we interact with mails is likely to change thanks to the emergence of apps that read emails for us, extracting relevant travel information and presenting it in an organised way.

A pioneer of this approach is the Concur TripIt travel organiser app that automatically builds travel itineraries based on emails that you have received. You just need to share your emails with TripIt and the software searches through them looking for anything related to travel reservations. These are then combined into trip itineraries and presented in a standard format on the TripIt app.

What makes the TripIt scheme interesting is that it can work with emails from different companies in different formats, extracting information automatically without any effort from the consumer. Effectively, it’s just like having your own personal assistant except that it is much faster and never takes a day off. Not everyone likes the idea of trusting an assistant, but most people are convinced when they test an organiser app like TripIt and see that it really works.

But TripIt is not the only company with this idea and something similar is now offered with Google’s standard Inbox app, the mobile-first new version of Gmail. Launched last year, Google Inbox introduced a new way of managing email using automatic tools that sort messages into bundles and presents not just a list of email subjects lines but the highlights of each message. So if a message contains a photo on the home screen you see the photo.  

More interestingly, if any messages contain travel information – flight confirmations, boarding passes, hotel reservations and so on -- Google Inbox reads these messages, works out which belong to which trip and groups all the messages related to a trip into one place, creating what is effectively an itinerary. The way this works is by putting together flights, hotel bookings and even messages from people you are going to meet, all linked to a banner titled ‘Trip to X’ with the date and even a photo of the destination.

Google’s Inbox and rivals based on the same approach could be challenge for travel app builders

Google’s Inbox and rivals based on the same approach could be challenge for travel app builders since it is part of a popular email app that will be downloaded by many users, and perhaps even factory installed on some Android phones.

More alarmingly for marketers is the way Concur’s Tripit and Google’s Inbox processes the messages on the server side, so once the useful information has been extracted the user has no further use for the rest. But it is in that discarded part of the email that marketers often include key additional messages for upselling or promoting new products. The trend towards machine analysis of emails is a serious threat to these lucrative side effects of standard confirmation messages.

But even Google’s Inbox is threatened in a way by smartphone companies like Apple. Many features that are initially third-party apps often end up being built into a device and travel organising is no exception. In some ways this is already happening. Check in for a flight using your iPhone app and a boarding pass is sent to the iPhone’s Passbook app, where it is stored until needed. You can open the passbook manually and look for the boarding pass but as you approach the airport on the day of the flight the boarding pass will automatically appear on the lock screen of your phone.

Apple’s passbook requires that your boarding pass be sent in a special format, but it’s not hard to see that the integration of technology for extracting travel itinerary details from emails could all be embedded into your phone or watch. This might be convenient for consumers but it could also be a threat not just for companies that market third party travel apps like TripIt but also for marketers who use routine confirmation mails for marketing.

 This will be an interesting challenge for the travel industry in the next few years.