Facebook Friends Help Plan Your Trip with Gtrot

“The best way to get ready for your trip is to share it with your friends,” Zachary Smith says.

Smith is the co-founder and CEO of Gtrot, a startup launching Monday that taps Facebook’s social graph to help travelers better plan and share their trips.

On Gtrot, which is short for globe-trotting, users login with Facebook, forward their flight or hotel confirmations to trips@gtrot.com and use the site to connect with Facebook friends who live in the city they’re visiting, have visited in the past, or with whom they have intersecting travel plans.

With one click, users can notify those friends of their upcoming plans and request advice. Gtrot will post a message to each friend’s Facebook wall and pull all of the related comments back into the site and associate them with the appropriate trip.

“Gtrot makes it easy to connect with Facebook friends who can have an impact on your trip,” Smith explains.

First started as a class project at Harvard, Gtrot went on to win the Harvard College Innovation Challenge and has piggybacked on Facebook data to graduate from a college assignment to a venture-backed business. It also followed Facebook’s college-only invite model, operating in private beta since the first version was released in late 2009 at Harvard. “It went viral at Harvard … and spread through the Ivy League,” Smith says.

The startup also attracted the attention of Lightbank, the investment vehicle of Groupon founders Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell. Gtrot now works out of Lightbank’s Chicago offices and has the added bonus of being able to bounce ideas off of Groupon’s upper echelon.

Gtrot is launching into a crowded space, however, with the idea of socializing travel getting a bit tired. We’ve seen Dopplr, Tripit, TripAdvisor and a host of other startups dabble in the space. Even Airbnb, once focused on the booking side of the travel equation, is now socializing the pre- and post-stay experience, letting travelers see how they’re socially connected to cities and rentals.

What makes Gtrot different? “We’re innovative in how we use Facebook data,” Smith says.

The site is adept at digging up Facebook data relevant to users’ future trips. It accesses friends’ work history, location and any other public profile elements that associate them with places. The formula allows for an ideal new user on-boarding experience — a Gtrot user need not have any friends on Gtrot to get the intended value of the service.

Gtrot also delivers daily deals, sourced from deal aggregator Local Offer Network, to members based on their destination. The user will begin to receive curated daily deals offers via email five days before a trip begins and each day thereafter, up until the last day of the trip.

Gtrot’s first 6,000 users, mostly Ivy League students, have already shared trips to more than 45,000 cities. Smith says users have been highly responsive to the daily deals emails.