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We’ve got a few new features you won’t want to miss. Before you do anything else, take a minute to input your study abroad city  on gtrot. (Better yet, just book your flights and hotels through gtrot and we’ll share your plans automatically!).  Get your friends to do the same.  Then you can visit your “my friends” page all summer long to track down friends, see who’s nearby, and get together when your plans overlap.

It’s simple.  If you want to book the same flight or hotel as a friend, just visit his or her profile.  (You can access a friend’s profile directly from the My Friends page.)  You’ll have the option of booking any shared flight or hotel in any upcoming trip.  Clicking the “book” button automatically opens a flight or hotel search with your friend’s booking at the top!

We also pull in similar flights / hotels from Kayak.com and Hotels.com — two of the most trusted brands in online travel — to ensure that you get the best deal available.  That’s just another way we’re making travel easier, cheaper, and way more social.

Flight and hotel booking
You can now book flights and hotels anywhere in the world directly on gtrot. We partnered with Kayak and Hotels.com to bring you the largest selection of flights and hotels at the lowest prices. And we built one of the fastest and most user-friendly search interfaces available on the web. Try it for yourself!

Automatic trip sharing
Anytime you book a flight or hotel through gtrot, we automatically add your itinerary to the appropriate trip on your gtrot profile. That makes it easy for you to share not just the cities you’re visiting, but also where you’re staying and how you’re getting there.

Social booking features
When your friends visit your gtrot profile, they can book your same flight or hotel with the click of a button. Planning group trips has never been easier!

Better privacy settings
You have complete control over what information you share and with whom you share it. You can hide your bookings, particular stops, and entire trips. You can also block individual Facebook friends from accessing your information.

And there are more features on the way! Next week we’re launching a cab-sharing tool for our college users (just in time for spring break), which will help students find peers with similar flight times for shared cabs to the airport. We’re also developing a number of additions to the “my friends” page. Send any feedback and suggestions to contact@gtrot.com.

Finally, we need your help to keep growing. Talk to your friends about booking and sharing their spring break plans on gtrot.com, and post links to the site in your Facebook status! Thanks and happy travels!

Try it out! Enter your past travel information, and then explore your friends’ trips – see where they are, where they’ve been, and where they’re going.  We make it simple: On the “My Friends” page, you can filter aggregated trip data by friend, city, or date to answer questions like, What are my friends doing for spring break? Who else will be in Montreal next week? Where is my roommate going this summer? Which of my friends has been to Paris? In a matter of seconds, you can find the holiday hotspots, get advice from friends who have been to your destination, and locate friends with overlapping plans.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll launch the booking features that will make gtrot.com the one-stop shop for everything travel.  We’ll soon offer traditional tools for booking flights and hotels, and social tools to help students share cabs to the airport and rides to/from campus.  These tools will be seamlessly integrated with the current interface, making it even easier to share your travel plans with friends.

We’re glad to have you as our very first gtrotters!  We hope you enjoy using gtrot and sharing it with friends.  We’ll be in touch over the next several weeks as we roll out additional features, and please send us your feedback so that we can make the gtrot user experience even better!

On gtrot.com, you find the cheapest flights and hotels in seconds, and then use our “share a cab” feature to find taxi-buddies for your trip to the airport.  Driving home instead?  Then use our simple ride-sharing feature to catch a ride home, saving money while reducing the environmental costs of holiday travel.  We help you manage and edit these arrangements on your own travel page, complete with an interactive academic calendar and travel map (showing everywhere you’ve been and places you’re going).

More importantly, we make it easy to explore your friends’ trips and share your own.   Our innovative sharing interface allows you to search aggregated trip data by friend, holiday, date, or city, giving you answers to questions like:  Where are my friends going for Spring Break? What is my cousin doing this Thanksgiving? Who else will be in Montreal in mid-June?  Which of my friends has been to Paris and can give me some travel tips?

It’s just that easy to explore your friends’ trips, find the holiday hotspots, and locate friends with overlapping plans.  Because we use Facebook Connect, you can log into gtrot using your Facebook information – no registration necessary – and immediately connect with other users in your Facebook social network.  And don’t worry:  simple privacy settings let you choose how your information is shared.

Easy, cheap, social, and green.  That’s the way travel should be.

We asked our friends and classmates this question.  Based on their responses, we compiled a list of everything a student needs in order to make optimal plans.  It’s actually pretty simple:

• Academic information:   Know when you’re off from school, and when you need to be back on campus.
• Social information:  Know where your friends are going, which friends have been to your destination, and who else will be there too.
• Booking tool: Access to the largest inventory of flights and hotels at the lowest prices.  And how about cab- and ride-sharing features to lower the personal and environmental costs of holiday travel?
• Management tool: A central place to store bookings, and to track and share personal travels.

There are a lot of travel sites out there (ok…too many), and several of them are good for booking or managing travel.  Kayak.com is an obvious example of the former; TripIt.com of the latter.  And if you want to plan out your travels hour-by-hour, picking restaurants and hotels and museums and parks to visit weeks in advance of your trip, leaving nothing to chance and eliminating all spontaneity…if you have that kind of time and taste, there are sites for that too (see travelmuse.com).

But for students especially, these tools need to be driven by social and academic information.  No website gathers that information and presents it in a useful way.  And as for the booking and management tools already in use, most of them are overly-developed and needlessly complex.

All that’s about to change.   It’s coming soon:  gtrot.com.

It’s simple:  I give you the bordering countries, and you name the country.

1. Germany, France, Belgium

2. Spain, Algeria, Mauritania

3. Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Turkey

4. Italy, France, Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein

5. Sweden, Finland, Russia

6. Spain and France (hint: it’s not Monaco!)

7. China, Russia

8. Israel, Libya, Sudan

9. Nicaragua, Panama

10. China, Cambodia, Laos

We didn’t quite sweep this round, unfortunately.  How’d you do?  Answers after the jump.

1. Luxembourg

2. Morocco

3. Greece

4. Switzerland

5. Norway

6. Andorra (toughie!)

7. Mongolia

8. Egypt

9. Costa Rica

10. Vietnam

More travel trivia next week, stay tuned.

I left Boston by car at 5:00am yesterday morning to arrive in Montreal (or, rather, the sleepy suburb of Saint-Louis-de-Gonzague) before noon.  My girlfriend and her father had chosen Montreal for their 100-mile charity ride, and I wanted to be waiting at the finish line when they crossed.  (Did I mention they were riding unicycles?)  It was a 5.5 hour drive on less than 4 hours of sleep, but it was absolutely spectacular.  Having grown up in Texas, I never saw upper New England in the summer.  If you’re free on a sunny afternoon, take I-93 North to I-89, through New Hampshire and Vermont, for some of the most beautiful scenery America has to offer.  You’ll notice a few interesting things: New Hampshire has more country radio stations than central Texas, I-89 has mad speed traps and several “Moose crossings”, and Subaru has like 50% market share in Vermont.

The drive through Canada was even more interesting.  I took a rural route west of Montreal, on mostly one-lane roads.  The streets are in total disrepair, there are construction zones every 5 miles, and not a single police officer (mounted or otherwise) in sight.  I’m pretty sure this is the status quo: several times I stopped for directions because the GPS wanted me to go on roads that were closed for repair.  Each time, though, the locals told me to ignore the signs and barricades and continue on my way, which I did without problems.  It turned into joy-riding at its finest – no rules, straight-shot streets screaming “speed!”, and an idyllic backdrop of green fields, red barns, and blue skies.  I’m telling you, make this drive soon, and with the sunroofs drawn.

I spent the afternoon exploring the small towns southwest of Montreal, by the island of Salaberry-de-Valleyfield.  The people were very kind, but a bit intrigued as to why I was loitering in the area.  (I speak no French, aside from the line I picked up in that Moulin Rouge song, making it difficult to blend in.)  At 4pm I was waiting on the bike trail, very amused by its pristine condition (compared with the roads I had just seen).  But then Montreal is one of the top cycling cities in North America, with more than 300 miles of paved paths.  In any case, the riders crossed the finish line shortly thereafter, having traveled 100 miles by unicycle in less than 100 hours.  We celebrated over a bottle of champagne, and then drove the 25 miles into downtown Montreal for the night.

Montreal is actually an island, surrounded by rivers to the north and east and lakes to the southwest.  We stayed at the Hotel Nelligan in Old Montreal, named for its quaint cobblestone streets and original 18th and 19th century French and British architecture.  It’s a stunning part of town, right by the St. Lawrence river, with boutique shopping and restaurants rivaling any European city.  The historical landmarks (like the Notre-Dame Basilica and Bonsecours Market) are impressive.  As the global headquaters of Cirque du Soleil, the local skyline also features a mammoth yellow circus tent.  It falls just in front of the famous Biosphere, which looks a lot like Epicot’s Spaceship Earth, making the whole thing a bit Disney-esque.  We had a fantastic dinner at a local French restaurant (elk and buffalo with goat cheese and mixed vegetables – $27 USD) and went back to the hotel for 5 hours of sleep.

I had to leave early this morning for work (the gtrot website is coming along well!), and didn’t get to see that much of Montreal, but I loved the drive and my time in the city.  I definitely had one of those rare instant connections with the place and people -  a feeling I’ve had only a few times, in places like Buenos Aires and Rome.  I’ll be back soon, and recommend you check it out too!

Our development team is made up of college students and recent grads who share a passion for technology and travel.  Not just the backpack-across-Europe, trek-through-the-Amazon kind of travel, but also the casual trips that are a regular part of college life: the holiday weekends at home, the roadtrips to conference games, the spring break vacations with friends.

We want to make all these experiences cheaper, easier, and more social.  (More environmentally-friendly too!)  But most of all, we want travel to be simple again.  Enough with the exhaustive trip planning tools, and the barrage of annoying add-on offers.  We’re harnessing the power of web-based technology and the Facebook social network to bring you simple and essential booking features, the cheapest prices, and the academic and social information you need to arrange your travels and share them with friends.

Easy, cheap, social, and green.  That’s the way travel should be.

Happy travels,
Zach and Rob, co-founders of gtrot.com