TripStalker Blog

Greetings TripStalkers!  I write this on the verge of the biggest TripStalker release in some time.  We have made some difficult decisions for this release, but we feel it is in the best interest of our fellow TripStalkers.  Probably the most shocking change to our users is that we have decided to drop the Car and Hotel feature from TripStalker.  You will still be able to book these directly from our website and as 'companions' to your air travel, however we will not stalk these items or give trip alerts for hotels or cars independently.

Why have we decided to make this move?

Quite simply we wanted to be more focused.  The development of TripStalker has been slow and we want to speed it up.  There are many features we want to add into the application and by focusing on air travel alerts we will be able to perfect this aspect of TripStalker.  At a later date we may circle back around to hotels and cars, but for now we are focusing on air travel.  In addition airline ticket prices are by far the most volatile and thus the most suited to stalking. 

If you have existing Hotel and Car stalks you will still be able to book these through the website.  However, as of the next release, you will not be able to enter in new hotel or car stalks.

To the majority of TripStalkers who use TripStalker for air fare alerts, I think you will be very pleased with this next release.  We have opened up the interface, given more room to air stalks, introduced historical graphing of the stalk price and dramatically improved the scraping engine for checking on the price of your trip.   There is still a lot of room for improvement, but we believe this release is a strategic shift for us and will allow us to more rapidly roll out new features for the air fare alerts. 

Thank you and stay tuned! 

Time really flies when you're building software!  Wow!  Well, just because there haven't been any blog posts recently doesn't mean we haven't been hard at work.  Just the opposite, in fact, we have put blood, sweat and tears in to the last few iterations of TripStalker.  We are now scraping several airline sites directly (I'll publish a full list on the website with our redesign - see more below), we look at some consolidators and at the good old fashion GDS.  All this from your computer desktop.  The results are aggregated and presented to you on a continuous basis to help you snag that often allusive low fare for your exact trip. 

We have a laundry list of features to add to TripStalker and are continuously striving to make it the absolute best tool out there to assist you in finding the trips and fares you want.   Some of the more popular feature requests are:

• Mac Support
  
  We gained a lot by utilizing the dot net platform for developing this application.  One of the biggest losses has been Mac and Linux users.  As we have tried to take a different approach to searching for travel, this user base who is unafraid of trying new and inventive ideas would have been extremely useful to have with us on this path.  I only hope that a lot of you have to use PC's at work and can use TripStalker there!  Seriously, we have eyed the Mono Project from the beginning as a way run TripStalker on multiple OS's.   It looks like this is finally getting close to becoming a reality. As soon as we finish adding our next batch of sites / data sources into TripStalker we will begin testing it with Mono to enable full cross platform support or TripStalker.
  
• Multi-Point Destination
  
  I can see how this would be a great addition to TripStalker.  The limitation of one-way or round trip is truly annoying.  In an app like ours this presents some unique challenges.  Namely, not all the data sources we use natively support multi-point trips.  However, at a minimum allowing for this and just utilizing the data sources that do is on the short list.   We will also need to work on some serious interface changes in order to allow for the easy entering of all your points.
  
• Easy Management of Stalks through our Web-Based Interface
  
  We hear you and we agree.  The stalk interface on the web site needs some work.  We're on it.  While TripStalker needs to be running on an active desktop computer to be able to do its job, there is no reason you can't manipulate your stalks from a web interface.  Say, for instance, you want to leave TripStalker running on your home computer but then want to manage your stalks from work.  Look for this soon.

As some of you may have noticed this community runs on the community server from telligent systems.  Just releases is Community Server 2007.  We will be bringing the front end website and the community under one wrapper and updating the design slightly as a result.  This will provide tighter integration between the TripStalker website and the TripStalker community  - a point of confusion to our users for some time. 

Thanks as always for your support!  And if the next blog post doesn't come for a little while it is only because we are too busy getting new releases and site updates out the door. 

 

It has been a busy summer here at TripStalker!  We are diligently working on the scraping engine for the TripStalker client. Once this is complete you will see a lot of changes.  Each stalk will return multiple results based on where the stalk was found.   You will also be able to specify to only stalk certain sources.  This will also allow you to stalk fares on low-fare carriers like Jet Blue or ATA that do not commonly publish their fares on the GDS's.  This also means that if you like to book on the airline website to get extra miles and avoid booking fees, TripStalker will now enable this.  We are hoping to roll this major new feature out in the next couple of months. 

This also represents a shift in business strategy for TripStalker.  Initially, we were focused on paying for this service through booking fees.  After listening to our user feedback we have come to realize that a) people don't like booking fees (shocking!) and b) people want to be able to stalk individual airlines, hotels, etc and easily book directly on the providers site.  As a result, you will also start to see ad spots in more places like in the TripStalker application, in the notifications, etc (hey we've got to pay the bills around here!)..  we hope this won't be too much of a inconvenience and will be working to try and deliver more relevant ads so that you may actually benefit from seeing related products / services that can help you along your way.

Finally, as you can see we have upgraded the community software we are using to the latest version.  We are working with the skin and will be moving toward unifying the TripStalker site and the community site even closer together. 

Thanks for using TripStalker, we look forward to continue to help you stalk your trips!  We have a lot of features that we want to add, but keep the feedback coming!  Also, it is best to post in our forums vs. sending an email as we don't always have time to respond to every e-mail, so posting it puts it out for public debate and gives the feedback a place to live. 

More updates soon....

Well, if you follow this site you've noticed we have dropped off with updates over the past month.  This is because we have been diligently working and testing TripStalker in our development environment for some much needed bug fixes.  Along the way, we have improved performance, optimized the code and believe we have the most usable and stable version of TripStalker yet.

The most important bug fix we put in place is a chaching mechanism for entering and modifying your stalks.  Many people reported strange behavior where the application would hiccup and not record the stalk when it was entered.  We traced this as happening most often with people on crowded Internet connections.  As a result, the TripStalker will now record all the stalk information then upload it to our server sas a background process if it can not immediately insert the stalk.  This means that user should no longer have any problems adjusting their stalks.

Starting on Monday you should get a pop-up dialogue when you load TripStalker that requires you to upgrade.  This should be a relatively fast and painless process resulting in a better application. 

As of this release we are free to begin working on new features.  Most immediatley this includes introduction of our client side scraping engine (already in tests) which will allow the TripStalker to stalk not only Internet fares but also fares available directly through providers websites.  It is our belief that this feature will truly propel TripStalker from a useful tool into a tool that any travel savy consumer won't be able to do without. 

Thanks for all our users valuable feedback and patience.  We will continue to keep you updated here as things progress.  Now that this version is ready we will have more time to spend on the community again.

The New York Time's recent article, "Rough Summer Is on the Way for Air Travel", opens with:

Brace yourself for a summer of miserable air travel.

Planes are expected to be packed fuller than at anytime since World War II, when the airlines helped transport troops. Fares are rising. Service frills are disappearing.

In the Business Week article from December, "The Airlines' $5 Billion Showdown", it states:

Sabre's October deal with AirTran Holdings (AAI). Sabre cut GDS fees, and AirTran gave Travelocity discounted package tickets -- and stopped selling through Worldspan. Under this agreement, Sabre actually makes more from AirTran than before, both companies say, though a source near the talks says AirTran pays Sabre just $5.50 per round-trip. "It's because of increased volume and the limited participation of other GDS [companies]," AirTran VP Kevin Healy says.

What does this mean for the travel consumer?  Two things, first not all travel sites will be accessing the same data.  Sites that use the Sabre GDS will get different data than sites that use the Worldspan GDS.  Now throw web fares into the mix (fares available exclusively on airline web sites).  Not to mention consolidator and bucket buy shops.  This quagmire of a distribution system for air fare leaves the consumer wondering how he/she can ensure the best price for their travel needs. 

Well, it's a good thing there is TripStalker!  In response to the continued fragmentation of the industry we are working round the clock on perfecting our scraping engine to bring you even more data sources for your stalks.

In the coming months look for drastic improvements in the stalking capability and the reporting service detailing exactly where the fare was found.  This will give you, the consumer, a near real-time breakdown of the exact price that is available from multiple sources across the Internet.  As we do now, the TripStalker agent will continue to check, re-check, and check again on the price keeping you constantly informed with fare alerts to notify you the moment your stalk drops below your notify price.

As the market evolves we see TripStalker as becoming an even greater value to the average travel consumer.   So take comfort when sitting on that packed flight this summer and looking at the passengers around you that you were the winner who paid the least money for the exact same seat!

In response to user feedback we've rolled out two new features to the new "My Stalks" area of the site.  These features allow you to view your active stalks via the TripStalker website by clicking on the "My Stalks" in the upper right hand corner of the site.  This is a handy feature as many times users will have TripStalker running on their home computers, but will want to check on their latest stalk price from their work computer or other location. 

In addition, we have enabled RSS feeds for your stalks.  This means you will be able to add your stalks to services like My Yahoo, My AOL, Google home page or any number of RSS readers.  This gives the user yet another way to keep tabs on their active stalks so the moment the price drops you'll be able to book the ticket! 

Look for continued improvement and functionality to the "My Stalks" section of the site as we continue our tight integration between the downloadable TripStalker application and the website.  

I get asked this question all the time.  It would be cross-platform.  Easy to use.  Seamlessly updated.  And run in a browser window.  While these are all great things, the one crucial aspect of TripStalker - that it is always running stalking your trips on your system - would be missing.  For this reason, we have to make it a download-able software application.  However, we are going to be making improvements to the website "my account" area such that you will be able to view your stalks, update the notify price, and book a stalk.  We have also been producing an RSS engine so that you can add your stalks to any standard RSS reader to keep 'tabs' on them.  This will enable you to extend the use of TripStalker to places you may not want the application installed (like a tightly controlled work environment).  We will be improving on this "dual interface" approach as time goes on, but we will always require some sort of agent to be running on your machine as that is a key part of TripStalker's architecture. 

Thanks for all the great suggestions - keep them coming - and feel free to post them in our forums so we can get a good discussion going.  Most of the great feedback so far has come through e-mail.  While this is tremendous, posting this for others to comment on will ultimately make TripStalker better.  Remember, there's no such thing as a bad post! (I hope I don't regret saying that).

Thanks to all our great users!

Appropriately after the Easter holidays we are releasing a new version of TripStalker.  You will not notice a lot of front-end changes, but we have done a lot of work to the back end.  The application should run faster and the skinning system has been completely updated.  Most importantly, and the major change for this release, is to have the TripStalker work better with the various Internet Security products.   We have tested with every major Internet Security product on the market and TripStalker now correctly registers itself with the product and will have the Internet Security product automatically trigger a pop-up alert (if you have it set to block unknown applications) requesting your permission to let TripStalker communicate with the servers.

In addition, we have worked on how TripStalker behaves when it can't communicate with the TripStalker servers.  It now will display a nice message letting you know it's unable to communicate and will quietly keep trying in the background.  This behavior is much more friendly and if you're like me, I run TripStalker on my laptop and am in various states of connectivity, you'll find the application much more usable and probably more willing to let it auto launch and stay running on your system.

Enjoy the new version and please post to the TripStalker Support Forum if you have any problems with the upgrade.  The next big improvement we will be making is to the notifications, we've received a ton of feedback on making those better and we're already into it!

Thanks!

Internet security products are GREAT and everyone should use one - even if it's built in. However, as a software developer they can be a real hassle to tray and navigate the tricky waters to ensure your application is able to communicate via the Internet.  By far the largest number of user problems we've had with TripStalker have beena result of the users Internet Security product blocking it in one way or another.  I'm very happy to say that we have spent a great deal of time tweaking TripStalker so that it appropriatley triggers pop-ups from the various Internet Security products and informs the user if it is unable to connect out to the Internet. 

In addition, it seems that a lot of users would loose and gain their Internet connection quite frequently.  This was causing problems as the TripStalker would get confused if it was connected or not.  We have now modified TripStalker so that it is much more friendly and unintrusive during the loss of an Internet connection.  It just kind of quietly goes dorment waiting for the connection to be restored.  This should work better and drastically reduce the errors coming in through our automated error reporting.

Finally, we had a lot of errors being reported automatically (did not cause any adverse behavior to the end user) regarding the skin system.  This has been completely redone and should result in the TripStalker behaving much quicker than ever before.

These main items are what have occupied our days and nights.  We are glad to be closing in on them and will have a new build up soon.  Thanks to all of you and do visit our forums to chime in on your suggestions, thoughts, etc.!

 

Wow! That is all I can say.  Response has been phenomenal.  We have received more feedback than we can possibly handle.  So, let me take this moment to first apologize for slow response times to your feedback e-mails.  Many people have written in with the same comments.  I will attempt to summarize some of these w/ answers here.  In addition, we will use this blog to keep you up to date on the current state and direction of TripStalker. 

Now, I'll give some insight into where we are and where we are currently going with TripStalker.  The idea behind the application, as you probably are aware, is to analyze the spikes and dips in travel prices as providers respond to market conditions.  By doing this, TripStalker is able to notify you when there is a dip that drops below your entered in notify price.  This is designed to get you the best priced trip for your exact travel criteria.   Now, there are a lot of services that offer you the best price between two cities; however, our goal is to take your exact travel criteria and by searching continuously (or stalking) your trip we are able to get you the best price for the exact dates, ariline, etc.  This service is targeted at people who do not necessarily have flexible travel dates.  Perhaps they want to maximize vacation days, or they have a particular event to attend.  Such requirements result in the need to travel on specific days with specific criteria.

One of our core philosophies as a company is to evolve and be driven by the needs of our users.  We have started simple around a basic concept and are intent on taking that concept and evolving it continuously into something greater.  (This is why user feedback is so important to us!)  The core tenant holding everything together being the users desire to find the absolute best priced trip for their exact travel criteria.  As a result, one of our first efforts after releasing the application to the public has been to setup a community system for disseminating information, creating a support system and allowing "trip stalkers" to share information about how they were able to best "stalk" their trip and get the best price possible.  In order to accomplish this we picked out the teligent community server to setup the community tools necessary.  Please take a look at our forums and post a few thoughts.  Much thanks.

One of the biggest challenges and source of feedback has been problems with TripStalker being able to connect back to the TripStalker servers.  Many times Internet Security products block TripStalker's connection.  If you experience the application hanging "on loading" or any troubles connecting to the Internet your first troubleshooting step should be to ensure there are no Internet security products blocking the connection on your computer.

We are going to soon launch a major update to the TripStalker application - this update will address many small bugs and also improves on the user interface.  When this update is launched your TripStalker should upgrade itself.  The exception being on people who use the TripStalker under a non-administrative account.  These people will need to manually install (apologies).  This has been corrected in the latest version.

Thanks for all your support and please visit our forums to post and make this a true community!