WorldMate's Retreat Leaves Itinerary-Organizing Rivals in Dogfight

Back in the days of Blackberrys, Nokia S60s, and Palm Pilots, WorldMate was the leading mobile app for organizing itineraries. During the 2000s, it was routinely one of the top 10 highest-grossing mobile apps. Yet WorldMate is winding down after a 17-year-run, surprising many. (It claimed 10 million users.) At the end of March, travel management company Carlson Wagonlit Travel will pull the app from stores. By September it will stop supporting many of the app's functions. Gone. Poof. Rivals now see an opening to gain share. The largest is TripIt, which touts having 13 million user accounts. It's run by travel expenses software company Concur, part of German software group SAP. The other top competitor is TripCase, which claims 11 million user accounts. It is backed by travel software company Sabre. There's a debate over user numbers. App Annie, which tracks downloads, says that in the U.S., TripIt has seen well over 5.7 million downloads since late 2009 and TripCase has seen more than 2.8 million downloads since its launch, across both iOS and Google Play platforms. TripIt measures a user as someone who signs up for and verifies an account. Some users go web-only, and some access TripIt via the mobile web, neither of which situations would be traced by App Annie. TripCase measures users similarly. Lost Mojo WorldMate was most popular in Europe. After 2007, TripIt eclipsed it as the hot commodity in the Americas. In recent years, WorldMate, TripIt, and TripCase have all been undermined by the spread of free tools like Apple Wallet for displaying flight and hotel information on the fly. For instance, a user of Gmail and a Google Android phone can see details of their upcoming flight and hotel reservations extracted and displayed on their phone screens automatically at the relevant moments. That said, TripCase says it added more than a million users in December, and TripIt said its engagement levels have remained "strong". Why WorldMate Wiped Out A spokesperson for Carlson Wagonlit, which acquired WorldMate in 2012, describes the consumer-focused WorldMate app as "a non-strategic and de minimis part of our business." It decided that putting the effort into supporting a consumer-facing app with product and engineering resources didn't align with its core as a travel management company. Some industry insiders expected the move. Nadav Gur, one of WorldMate's co-founders and its chief executive for a decade, says, "The com