The travel community now has a tool for coordinating trip plans and sharing travel ideas, with friends and family

Concierge.com is making it easy for the discriminating traveler to collect, organize and share travel information with the
introduction of Suitcase, a travel-planning tool available now at suitcase.concierge.com.

Concierge.com, the Internet's leading resource for travel inspiration and the online home of Condé Nast Traveler magazine, already provides travel ideas and insider guides from the elegant to the exotic. Now, with Suitcase, travelers will be able to save and organize the travel information they find on Concierge.com (or anywhere else on the web), create trip itineraries, and share them with traveling companions and the wider community of like-minded travelers.

Concierge.com's Suitcase tool is powered by Kaboodle, a free online service that allows users to collect, organize and share information on the web with one-click simplicity. Kaboodle collects information from any web page by automatically extracting relevant images and summaries. With Concierge.com's Suitcase, Kaboodle is further tailoring its service to the needs of travelers. 

"Our audience has come to rely on our insider tips and solid travel recommendations ," said Peter J. Frank, editor in chief of Concierge.com. "Now with Suitcase, we've unveiled a dynamic, elegant travel-planning tool and also created a community of smart, upscale travelers who can share ideas, advice, and opinions with each other."

SOCIAL EXPERIENCE

The online travel market is ripe for a tool dedicated to travel planning for people of similar interests. The Internet is already consumers' preferred method for researching travel, with more than 10 million U.S. Internet users researching travel online daily, according to the Pew Research Center.

We're thrilled to be working with Concierge.com to make online travel planning easy and to enable a social experience for its audience of active travelers," said Manish Chandra, founder and CEO of Kaboodle. "Since its inception, Kaboodle has been perfectly suited for travel—whether for collecting dream vacation ideas, organizing travel plans or collaborating on a family trip. Suitcase brings together Kaboodle's simplicity with a dedicated focus on the needs of travelers." 

As Concierge.com users create and share Suitcases, their travel collections will be available both to fellow Concierge.com members as well to the broader Kaboodle community, where travelers of all kinds can create and collaborate on travel ideas. 

SUITCASE FEATURES

Concierge.com's Suitcase stands out from other travel-planning tools on the web by combining the site's editorial eye for the best in travel—expert recommendations on hotels, restaurants, sightseeing, shopping, and more for nearly 200 destinations—with an elegant interface and a discerning community of sophisticated, affluent travelers. Among the features of Suitcase are: 

• One-Click Simplicity– Users can save almost any piece of information on Concierge.com—hotels, restaurants, articles, photographs, and more—by clicking an "Add to Suitcase" icon. In addition, an "Add to Suitcase" button can be downloaded to your browser's toolbar; with one click it extracts a summary of information from any web page, including an image, title, and description. 
• Captures Data Across the Web –Suitcase can gather information from anywhere on the web, not just Concierge.com. This makes it easy to add details from other sites, such as flight information, to the itinerary. 
• Itinerary Planning – Users can attach dates and times to items they've saved in a Suitcase and create a day-by-day itinerary for their trip. That information can be shared with fellow travelers for easy collaboration. 
• Sharing Options – On Concierge.com, users have the option of either making their Suitcase public, private, or available only to a select group of invited friends. 
• Slideshow – Each Suitcase will contain photographs automatically gathered from Concierge.com's database of 10,000 photographs or from other web pages. Users can also upload their own photos.