Tripnotes, a Buzzy ChatGPT-Based Trip Planner, Was Acquired

03.01.2024 - 12:37 / skift.com / Justin Dawes

Tripnotes got a lot of attention in early 2023 as one of the first experimental AI trip planners powered by ChatGPT. 

A demo of the product went viral on LinkedIn and Twitter in January and was shared by Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley. Tripnotes has been referenced consistently since then by media and industry professionals.

But in mid-December, the founders shut down the Tripnotes website several months after selling to Dorsia, a members-only restaurant reservation startup. Dorsia also bought Welcome, a city guide app similar to Tripadvisor and the owner of Tripnotes.

Why the sale? Tripnotes had buzz, but it needed money – which wasn’t easy to raise in 2023, especially after Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in March. 

“It was just a moment where everything froze,” Tripnotes and Welcome co-founder Matthew Rosenberg told Skift. “And it just became clear to us that even if you have a good idea, even if you have what I would consider really great early traction — we just found ourselves in a situation where we were going to have to find a different outcome than being able to raise another round and keep going.”

Tripnotes was among the first travel companies that said it was fully dedicated to building a trip planner powered by generative AI. Rosenberg told Skift in February that Welcome was fully refocusing its resources toward the Tripnotes project, which he saw as a way to better compete with industry leaders.  

Rosenberg had big plans of reinventing the city guide category with personalized recommendations and in-app travel booking. The team had been gathering data from user searches and online resources like blogs and social media. Tripnotes reached a million users within 45 days. 

There have been many generative AI trip planners released this year by small and large companies. None are reliable replacements for traditional trip planning yet. 

“I just haven’t seen anyone doing what we had imagined. And I deeply feel like what we were working on would have found success with enough time,” Rosenberg said. “I’m still optimistic that someone’s going to solve this problem in a really unique way.”

This situation aligns with early predictions that the large online travel agencies may end as the big winners — they have the resources to continue refining their AI trip planners.

Rosenberg, now vice president of product for Dorsia, was the CEO and co-founder of mobile video editing platform Cameo, which he sold to Vimeo in 2014. Many of the developers from that team co-founded Welcome and are among the team of six that has joined Dorsia.

“Personalization and AI — that was a core thing that was super important to us, and we didn’t have that muscle,” said Marc Lotenberg, founder and CEO of Dorsia. “To build that