TripHub: Trip planning 2.01

As I wrote in my May 17 blog post about Triporama, getting a group trip lined up is a major pain in the neck. It's also a lucrative problem to solve, and now there's a new player in the space, TripHub.

Really a highly-focused riff on Evite, TripHub helps you communicate plans and trips details with your travel partners. There's a trip blog, for example, and a section that lets you set up group invitations with rules for guests (you can allow people to bring others or not, for example). Each trip gets its own database of travel and hotel information to help travel partners coordinate their trips.

The site is peppered with useful links to other travel resources, including handy links to group travel pages on the major airlines -- although there's no way to compare group or charter rates directly. There's also a decent amount of original content about group travel.

The system has a rudimentary section for keeping track of who owes money to the trip's organizer, but it does not have a more useful multi-party funds tracking system like the students' financial site, BillMonk.

There are no post-trip utilities, like a group photo Web page or album printer.

All told, TripHub is a quite decent system for running the closed, private community it takes to organize a trip. It has similar functionality to the previously-covered Triporama, but I like it less, simply because it's been nearly three months since I covered Triporama, and in that time I was hoping we'd see more innovation in the group travel market.

See also reviews on Mashable and TechCrunch.