The following is an excerpt taken from CompeteBlog:

A number of websites designed to help consumers plan, book, and manage group trips have cropped up in the past couple of years. These include group booking tools such as Groople.com and GroupTravelPlanet.com, planning tools such as HomeAndAbroad.com and TripCart.com, and hybrid sites that combine a variety of features. It has been a rocky battle for these upstarts, many of which have not been able to either market themselves effectively to generate site traffic, or find the right product mix to sustain an active user base. “I’m in!”, a site launched in early 2007, however, is carving out its place in the market and in the past few months has seen its site traffic surge. ImIn.com helps consumers and groups generate new trip ideas and then follows up by providing organization, planning, and networking tools for managing the trip. The mix of content and functionality is striking a chord with consumers and has led to ImIn.com attracting over 170,000 U.S. visitors to its site in December. The figure is a larger total than has ever been observed within the category and is 2X to 3X higher than more established brands like Groople and HotelPlanner.

Opinion:

Literally, there are only very few group-booking-engine in the market today that can be considered off-the-shelf, but customizable. Group travel booking is a growing market, but developing technologies to automate the process proves to be challenging not only from a software development investment standpoint, but also technical challenges. Roundtrip Systems is a Free-Text Email, MS Outlook plugin, SMS and Speech-To-Text based booking engine, which are used as widget-like for corporate, leisure, GROUP, call center booking tools. With Roundtrip Systems built-in Group Bookings capabilities through the use of structured Excel format, any agent or consumer can populate unlimited number of passengers and varying itineraries into one Excel sheet, then upload into Roundtrip Systems group-booking-module and then few minutes travel product categories and associated price-quotes are presented to passengers booking coordinator/agent for single payment processing or it can be send individually to specific passenger for final booking and payment processing. Roundtrip Systems is a very powerful group booking tool, like nothing anyone have seen before. Roundtrip Systems has unified XML/API, which a client licensee can easily build a browser based booking interface.