Mobile Travel Assistants Become More Useful

As mobile devices become more and more powerful, it's easy to see why travel applications should become some of the most useful and popular mobile applications. When travelers are on the road, there's a lot that can go wrong, and they don't always have time to break out the laptop and figure things out. Of course, there more you can do on your mobile phone, the better, and at least a couple of companies are working on this as we speak.

I met with both upstart TripChill and the larger and more established WorldMate at PhoCusWright this week, and they both have similar types of products. In fact, the biggest difference is that WorldMate has created an application (its new WorldMate Live) for phones (currently only working with BlackBerry and Windows Mobile, but Symbian is coming soon). Meanwhile, TripChill is using a browser-based application instead.

The idea is that people will forward their itineraries to the companies, and the applications will act as a virtual personal assistant to stay on top of things. Both applications will monitor flight status from a variety of sources and if there's a delay, the user will be alerted and given the option to see alternate schedules. While this is helpful, it would be far more helpful if it had availability information and the ultimate app if it could rebook the passenger. That's still a long way away. The one thing that it can book is hotels. Both sites are using Hotels.com for users to book rooms and they can start interfacing with other sites like OpenTable for restaurants as well.

For now, it appears that WorldMate has the advantage in this space. They are much bigger (hundreds of thousands of WorldMate Live users as opposed to hundreds for TripChill), and they have their application preloaded on Nokia devices (it's the old WorldMate application now, but they expect that to change to the new WM Live app when it works on Symbian). But any advantage could disappear when the first application is created that allows mobile flight rebooking. That would be a killer app, but it's probably a long way off.

Edited 11/21 @ 752a to make it clear that these statistics apply to WorldMate's new Live product. WorldMate has existing products that work on 5 platforms and have 1.6 million users worldwide.