Calling All Android Users: You’ve Been Upgraded

Back in July, we launched the WorldMate for Android “Gold” premium services , and it has become one of the handful of apps to win the coveted “Editors Choice” designation from Android Market! Still, our team has been working overtime on major enhancements to the next iteration of WorldMate for Android—Version 4.0. We’re thrilled to announce its availability as of today! So, what’s new in 4.0?

Calendar Synchronization for Outlook, and Google/Android Calendar: Demand for this has been overwhelming—so here it is! Setup takes a minute or two and then all your flights/hotel/car rental reservations in WorldMate will automatically sync to your calendar.

Car Rentals: Renting a car by walking up to the rental counter at the airport is so 2010! With 4.0, you can reserve a car at hundreds of airports around the globe. Select from multiple car rental agencies including, Avis, Budget, Dollar, Thrifty, and many more.

Limousine Reservations: Guess what? Limos aren’t just for celebrities or going to the Prom. The next time you’re thinking about that $85 taxi from the airport into New York City, check WorldMate for a much more comfortable town car at comparable prices. With our partner, GroundLink, we’re providing limo reservations to/from airports all over the world. Reservations are made with a simple click to call or, if you just don’t like talking to people much, you can reserve directly within the app. Try it on your next trip and be one of “those people” who have a driver waiting for them at baggage claim.

Improved Graphics: We’ve redesigned the main screen to accommodate the ever-growing number of services with in the app. You will also notice the enhanced mapping functionality- WorldMate now displays a uniquely labeled pinpoint for the airport, hotel, and meetings in your itinerary.

Advertisements: My father always told me, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” WorldMate is closing in on 9 million registered users, many of whom are free users. Until now, we’ve been ad-free, only serving promotions for our hotel booking service or to our travel insurance/limousine booking partners, etc. With 4.0, we’re introducing 3rd party banner advertising to generate a little cash to pay for everything the millions of free users enjoy today (and to keep our investors and accountants happy!). We hope that its not too intrusive and that maybe you’ll even click one or two of them. Of course, if you upgrade to the Gold version, those ads will magically disappear.

Re-Introducing WorldMate for iPhone

We're very excited to announce that WorldMate for iPhone 2.0 is now available on the iPhone App Store. We've redesigned the app from the ground up and added all the latest iOS features to make organizing your travel plans an even better experience.

Included in this version

New design:
You'll love the beautiful new design of WorldMate 2.0 for iPhone; based on feedback from thousands of WorldMate users we've made everything nicer and easier to find.

A more complete itinerary:
We have added support for more details about your reservations, so each item in your itinerary now contains more details from your original flight/hotel/car reservation email.

Latest iOS updates:
WorldMate for iPhone now supports multi-tasking, fast app switching, Retina display and you can even open the app directly from a WorldMate import email.

WorldMate Gold has come to Android

Road warriors; your life just got much simpler.

WorldMate 3.0 for Android is out and with it comes WorldMate Gold, the premium service from WorldMate relied upon by hundreds of thousands of business travelers from around the world.

With WorldMate Gold you'll get:

Real-time flight alerts
Get instantly updated on flight delays, cancellations or gate changes with pushed alerts directly to your Android.
Flight status updates in your itinerary
Never miss an update your itinerary will be  auto updated with the real-time status of your flights or gate changes.
Flight status look-up
Check real-time flight status for over 350 airlines and instantly lookup information about flight delays, cancellations and gate changes.
Peace of mind for your next trip
Get all the convenience of flight alerts, status and lookup. Going Gold means you’ll always be one step ahead of everyone else when something goes wrong.

WorldMate Gold is available via in-app upgrade with Google checkout for just $9.90.

Get WorldMate 3.0 at the Android Market.

We have also included in this release pushed notifications for all itinerary updates, so any time you send us a travel confirmation email or edits your itinerary at worldmate.com you will get a pushed Android notification confirming that yourtravel items (flight, car, hotel, etc.) were successfully imported. This service is free for all users.

Road Warrior? Go Gold:

Get Real-Time Flight Alerts

Get instantly updated on flight delays, cancellations or gate changes with pushed alerts directly to your Android.

 

Road Warrior? Go Gold:

See flight status updates in your itinerary

Never miss an update your itinerary will be  auto updated with the real-time status of your flights or gate changes.

 

Road Warrior? Go Gold:

Check any flight’s status

Check real-time flight status for over 350 airlines and instantly lookup information about flight delays, cancellations and gate changes.

 

Road Warrior? Go Gold:

Have peace of mind for your next trip

Get all the convenience of flight alerts, status and lookup. Going Gold means you’ll always be one step ahead of everyone else when something goes wrong.

Big changes for our BlackBerry users – new look, new features, new price (free), new name – BlackBerry® Travel™

Exciting news for our long-time and loyal BlackBerry® users, as well as all travelers that carry a BlackBerry – today, in a joint effort with Research in Motion (RIM), we bring the Gold Service to the new BlackBerry® Travel™ Super App. This collaboration lets us take the best travel app for BlackBerry® and add a great new look, as well as a bunch of powerful new features. And the best news, all BlackBerry® smartphone customers can get it right now, and it’s a free app! Where do you find BlackBerry Travel? Just go to the Test Center category on BlackBerry App World™ and download BlackBerry® Travel™, and you have a new, even more powerful travel app at your fingertips. (for now Blackberry Travel is availible in the USA, Canada, the UK and Spain. More countries coming soon).

Here are the features you know and love, as well as the new ones you’ll find in BlackBerry® Travel™:

• Automatic Trip Scanning – As soon as your itinerary hits your inbox it is automatically and seamlessly loaded into the app
• All-In-One Service – No need to browse websites or other apps, everything is right at your fingertips from planning, booking, and alerts to integration with LinkedIn® and Yelp®
• Search and Book Hotels – Simply search for hotels in the area you plan to stay and book the one that suits your needs and budget
• Travel Notifications – No need to look up flight status, the information will push as it is available; you will know immediately if there are flight delays or cancellations
• Alternative Flights – Flight cancelled or delayed? Search for flights from any airport worldwide to find a new flight quickly and easily
• Easy Sharing – Share your travel details with friends, family or colleagues on LinkedIn from within the app. Update your status or search for people who may be in town at the same time as you
• Know Your Destination – Easy to use currency converter, weather forecasts, and any information you may need about every leg of your journey

WorldMate continues to expand its technology and deep travel and mobile expertise to better serve the traveler and our collaboration with RIM allows us to bring the convenience of mobile travel services to the world. BlackBerry® Travel™ represents the most sophisticated end user experience in functionality, automation and polish, making it easier than ever to manage all aspects of your travel from your smartphone. Let's make this the kick-start for the next era of travel.

BlackBerry® Travel– WorldMate and BlackBerry join forces to help you travel with confidence

Get WorldMate Gold for iPhone with an unbeatable Holiday special

WorldMate is ushering in the holiday season with a special offer for iPhone users; become a subscribed Gold Member and be eligible to all the unique Gold features available for just $0.99!

Flying to visit family over this holiday season? Why worry about flight delays? WorldMate Gold will give you real time alerts notifying you of any delays, and all the flight information needed. Get the latest up to date real-time news about your flight and travel plans! With Gold features you will receive pushed flight alerts, real-time flight alerts, automated flight updates, and priority customer support!

Make sure you take advantage of this special holiday offer to get the best mobile travel assistant at unbeatable price!

WorldMate Now Pilots Your Travel Itinerary on Android

Today WorldMate is now available for all Android users! Following tens of thousands of user requests, we wanted to give the best to our loyal travelers and extend our service to the Android platform. More importantly, we are bringing an unprecedented level of usability and polish to Android, focusing on keeping you up-to-date with rich travel alerts and notifications.

WorldMate strives to keep your travel organized and provide our users with the best services possible - being on the BlackBerry, iPhone, Symbian and now Android allows us to personally assist many more travelers around the world.

On the new Android app travelers can:
- Receive travel alerts for flights, meetings and more
- View full itinerary
- Link to flight status via Flightstats.com
- Link to Google Maps
- Smart Hotel Search and booking through Hotels.com
- Flight reminder notifications
- Currency, Weather and more!

You can find WorldMate in the Android Marketplace and read more here: www.worldmate.com/android

WorldMate Wins First Ever Business Traveler Innovation Award

Everyone at WorldMate was extremely excited yesterday to hear we won the first ever Business Traveler Innovation Award by the National Business Travel Association (NBTA) and The Wall Street Journal! Corporate travelers from around the world attended the 2010 NBTA International Convention & Exposition in Houston and attendees nominated their favorite innovative travel services, ideas, and products. A panel of travel experts, including former Travelocity CEO Terry Jones and Author of 1,000 Places to See Before You Die Patricia Schultz, picked WorldMate as the best of the bunch. While this is the first year for the NBTA award, we love the fact that it represents both the opinion of industry insiders
and general business travelers.

Congratulations to winners in other categories!

• Sustainable Practice: Enterprise Rent-A-Car Energy Efficient Thin Client Terminals
• Travel Personalization: Continental Airlines Mobile Boarding Pass
• Traveler Comfort and Well-Being: The Heavenly Bed by Westin Hotels and Resorts
• Meetings & Conventions: The Hyatt Meeting Promise
• Travel Convenience & Efficiency:  The National Car Rental Emerald Club
• Business Collaboration: Show and Share by Cisco Systems
• Traveler Productivity: iPad by Apple, Inc.

2010 has been an exciting year for WorldMate.  Our recent partnership announcements with Virgin Blue, American Express, Carlson Wagonlit and Travelport have greatly expanded our reach, and we continue to bring new functionality to the application.  In just the last few months we have announced LinkedIn integration, Tripcatch itinerary automation and the WorldMate Android beta app.  We’ve got plenty more in the pipeline that we’ll announce when the time is ripe, as we strive to fulfill our vision of making WorldMate the best travel service in the world.  We hope you all will continue to come along for the ride.

Safe travels!

WorldMate 4.0 With TripCatch: Let WorldMate Work For You

We're excited. Big time. For the last six months we've been working on TripCatch - the next phase in making WorldMate an even more convenient way for you to plan and manage your travel. We're just out of a closed Beta with about 1,000 active users, who told us quite plainly - "We love it". Well now you can get WorldMate with TripCatch too (well, on BlackBerry, for now).

What is TripCatch?

If you're reading this, you probably already know that WorldMate automates itinerary creation by reading the confirmation emails you forward to it, assembling the information in them into itineraries and adding location and meeting details. So far, you had to forward your confirmation emails to trips@worldmate.com manually. With TripCatch - even this is automated for you. TripCatch automatically identifies confirmation emails sent to you by travel agents, airlines, hotel chains etc., and integrates them into your itinerary. In plain English - TripCatch knows a certain email is a confirmation email and automatically takes care of it for you, it's that simple.

So what's so great about TripCatch?

TripCatch not only saves you the effort of manually forwarding an email. It also means that as soon as you get a confirmation email, WorldMate knows about your booking and can add it to your itinerary and start tracking it for you. So when you embark on your trip, you're guaranteed you have all your travel details with you. And as soon as you book something, WorldMate can help you with that booking - or assist with booking what you're still missing.TripCatch takes the hassle out of creating your itinerary. Whenever you enter WorldMate on your BlackBerry or on our website, your itinerary will already be built and will include all of your travel plans. It will save you time and effort and will make the whole process a lot easier.

I'm a control-freak. Can I retain control?

With TripCatch, you decide the level of automation you want. You can choose to have TripCatch alert you whenever a travel confirmation email is detected - at which point you can decide if you want to integrate that booking into your itinerary or not. Or you can decide to Always have TripCatch integrate the bookings it detects, and have a fully automated process. The choice is always in your hands.

 

So is WorldMate now looking into my inbox?

Your Privacy and Security Are Assured.

At WorldMate we take our members’ privacy very seriously. We built TripCatch with that goal in mind – it works quietly in the background only picking up travel-related emails. It filters emails with only very specific travel expressions and is careful not to pick up other messages.  It is optimized such that it almost never "catches" the wrong email. In fact, we had it catch dozens of thousands of emails during the private beta period, with virtually zero non-travel emails caught. Furthermore, all emails are immediately deleted off our server after they are parsed (including the ones that are "misses"), so even in the rare case the wrong email is caught, it is immediately deleted without a trace.

Your privacy is our concern. So much - that you don't have to take our word for it.We’ve partnered with privacy leader TRUSTe. They’ve certified our software and databases with the TRUSTe Privacy Seal to verify that your information is safe with us. Please see our privacy policy for more information about how we maintain your privacy.

How can I help TripCatch get even better?

If you appreciate the value of technology like TripCatch, you can help us improve it even further. We've launched TripCatch as a Beta to make sure we have an opportunity to keep improving it. If you'd like to assist us - please join our Product Improvement Program. By doing so you'll enable us to analyze those emails that TripCatch "misses", so that we can improve it even further.

Hey, what about us iPhone users?

We are working to enable TripCatch for you too. It is a little tricky, as iOS has different limitations, but we'll get there. And you'll be the first to know.

New to WorldMate, Search for Your Hotel by Brand-Name

As a savvy business traveler, you have your favorite airline and your favorite seat on the plane. You probably also have a favorite hotel chain no matter what city you’re in, which you’ve chosen due to their business facilities, personal amenities or other qualities. So when it comes to booking your hotel stay, wouldn’t it be easier to focus in on your preference instead of having to sort through a list of many other brands?

Here at WorldMate, we’re helping you do just that. This week we unveiled a new feature for our Hotel Search to help you zero in on your preferred brand.

Now when you visit our Hotel Search window on our website or your mobile device, you’ll see a new tab called Find By Hotel Name. Just fill in your destination city and your hotel brand preference, and we’ll do the rest. We’ll pull from our database of over 100,000 hotels, powered by hotels.com.

You don’t even have to enter the full hotel name. Just fill in the first couple of letters and it will display a drop-down menu that lets you choose just your brand. Filling in “Boston” and “Sher” will give you a list of all of the Sheraton hotels in the city.

The new feature is in addition to our already advanced hotel search, which lets you filter your hotel choice by a slew of characteristics.

The best part of the software is it remembers your brand preference, so next time you make a booking it will fill in the brand name and your other preferences.

Don’t forget for each hotel booking you make at WorldMate, you get a free month of our Gold Membership or a free two months for current Gold members.

So what are your waiting for? Login in today and see how easy it is to book your next hotel stay.