Travel and expense management company Concur, which earlier this year acquired TripIt and GlobalExchange, has invested $5 million in Yapta, a provider of airfare and hotel rate tracking services. The investment brings the total of capital raised by Yapta to $13.8 million.

As part of the investment agreement, Concur and Yapta have entered into a partnership under which Concur will exclusively use Yapta’s airfare price tracking and price assurance services for its TripIt Pro users. The parties also plan to explore additional opportunities for integrating Yapta’s services with Concur’s travel and expense management solutions.

Last April, Concur struck a similar deal with Indian online travel site Cleartrip, in which the company invested $40 million.

According to the press release, Yapta’s technology has conducted more than a billion price checks on millions of flights, revealing more than $350 million in savings for travelers.

Yapta, which helps travelers book airline tickets (and hotel rooms) as cheaply as possible, has raised close to $3.5 million of a $6.4 million financing round, an SEC filing reveals.

According to the information we’ve gathered through CrunchBase, the round will bring the company’s total amount of funding to $14.4 million.

Yapta lets travelers track fares from most of the major domestic and international airlines, allowing users to select flights to follow, and then be alerted when the price fluctuates. If the price declines after you purchase your ticket, Yapta will help you get a refund or credit from airlines that have lowest guaranteed fare policies.

The service was initially launched as a browser add-on in May 2007, morphed into a full-fledged website a year later and started tracking hotel prices in addition to flight fares in 2009.

Yapta has previously raised funding from Bay Partners, First Round Capital, Swiftsure Capital, and Voyager Capital, among others.

We’re big fans of TripIt, a nifty site that creates customized travel itineraries from travel confirmation emails. Today, the service is becoming even more useful by integrating Yapta.com, an airfare and hotel tracking service, into its platform.

Yapta lets you track fares from most of the major domestic and international airlines, allowing users to select flights to track, and then be alerted when the price fluctuates. If the price declines after you purchase it, Yapta will help you get a refund or credit from airlines that have lowest guaranteed fare policies. Travelers can now forward their flight confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com and can choose to have Yapta start tracking their flights for airline refunds or credits. TripIt members can then link their account to Yapta in order to be alerted when they are eligible for a refund or credit based on an airline’s “guaranteed airfare” policy.

Yapta, which has been able to gain a steady group of consumer followers since its launch in 2007, is revealing a few compelling statistics about airfare price fluctuations. To date, Yapta has conducted approximately 500 million airfare price checks, showing that seat prices on 45 percent of flights will drop before the cabin door closes. Approximately 15 percent of these flights are eligible for a refund or credit and since May 2007, Yapta has identified over $250 million in savings for its members, an average of $334 per traveler each year.

Yapta stands to gain a new influx of users with the integration with popular service TripIt. It’s made Michael’s list of products he can’t live without for three years running, and is quickly gaining fans among frequent travelers. Yapta also offers a companion hotel price tracking service.

Yapta.com, an online travel website that tracks airline ticket prices for travelers has added a hotel price tracking service that will help consumers monitor and compare pricing for 110,000 national and international hotels. Basically, Yapta lets consumers choose a hotel that best suits their travel needs and then sign up to be automatically alerted if and when the price drops for a particular stay.

Yapta has included several useful features to help consumers track hotel prices. First, the site will collect the lowest published rate of a tracked hotel and will create a graph that visually demonstrates the price of the hotel over time. Users can also track multiple hotels at once and compare pricing. Alerts can be customized by drop in price or by the frequency of alerts received. And like many travel sites, users can search for hotels by filters, including star rating, price, and amenities.

Yapta previously focused only on airfare flight tracking, where you can track fares from most of the major domestic and international airlines. Similar to the hotel feature, Yapta allows users to select flights to track, and then be alerted when the price fluctuates. If the price declines after you purchase it, Yapta will help you get a refund or credit from airlines that have lowest guaranteed fare policies. (Read our original review here).

The key functionality for Yapta is the tracking feature-it’s definitely a useful and easy way to compare travel prices without the hassle of having to constantly monitor changes in hotel and flight prices. Microsoft’s Farecast forecasts flight and hotel prices and then evaluates if the given price is a deal based on past fare history, but the site doesn’t actually track flights and hotels for you. Originally a browser add-on, Yapta became a website last year and is steadily growing in popularity (the site now has 600,000 registered users compared to 350,000 users in June of 2008). This new feature should be appealing to anyone looking for a travel deal, which is basically the entire world right now.

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Browser add-ons are a great, but not everybody uses them. If you want to build a serious Web business, it is probably still a good idea to have a Website as well. Last year, when Tom Romary launched Yapta he didn’t want to compete with all the other established travel Websites out there. So he created Yapta as a browser add-on that allowed travelers to track flight fares at the exact time when they were searching other travel sites for airfares. (See our initial review here).

Now, 350,000 registered users later, Yapta has finally launched as a full-fledged Website, where you can track fares from 23 different airlines, including American, Delta, United, Jet Blue, Virgin America, and many newly added international carriers (Air France, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, Lufthansa). Once you find a flight you like, you can track it, and Yapta will alert you when the price drops. If the price declines after you purchase it, Yapta will help you get a refund or credit from airlines that have lowest guaranteed fare policies (most of them do if you buy directly from the airline, which Yapta helps you do by linking directly to the airline sites).

Unlike Farecast (now owned by Microsoft), Yapta does not make fare predictions. It tracks actual prices and sends you an email alert when the price changes. Says Romary:

Prices are very volatile. What we’ve learned is that the answer to whether it is going up or down is. ‘Yes.’ It is going up and down. People want to know when it happens.

So far, with just its browser add-on, Yapta users have tracked more than one million flights and identified over $60 million in savings. Nearly $50 million of that was identified before purchase, and the rest came in the form of vouchers from the airlines after the fact. Of all the flights tracked, about half (46 percent) saw price drops.

Now that Yapta is a Website, maybe it will be able to grow beyond the niche that it has carved out for itself. If you have time to plan a trip a few weeks out in advance, Yapta can be really handy, especially in conjunction with Farecast which gives you an idea of how low prices on a particular flight might go. Too bad there isn’t an API for Farecast that lets Yapta integrate the prediction feature into its own site, or vice versa.

Yapta, which launched in May, has a unique approach to saving people money on travel: The core of the Yapta service is a browser bookmarklet or addon that lets users “bookmark” fares that they find on major travel sites. Ten airline and travel sites are currently supported, and many more will be added over time. See a flight you are interested in and bookmark it. The flight and fare information is then stored in your account at Yapta.

Find a number of different flight options at different sites, and then go back to Yapta to compare them. This is particularly useful when you fly Southwest or Jetblue, which do not provide flight information to other services. If the fare increases or decreases before you make a purchase, that will be reflected on the Yapta site.

If you make a purchase by clicking through to the airline or travel site from Yapta, they’ll continue to monitor the price. If it falls, they’ll ping you and suggest you contact the airline for a refund or flight coupon. All airlines offer these on price drops but few consumers follow up. Yapta will help by reminding you.

But Yapta is celebrating anyway, because they just launched the public beta of the service. The fire was a problem, Romary says. But they were able to move all employees to their investor’s offices and finish things up for the launch.

Yapta is very different from other travel sites we’ve covered. It is not hooked up directly to airlines’ systems (as Expedia and Oribitz are), nor is it essentially a search engine for low fares like Farecast. Instead, they’re using some of the ideas behind del.icio.us and bookmarking to create a potentially compelling new way for people to search for cheap flights.

The core of the Yapta service is a browser bookmarklet or addon that lets users “bookmark” fares that they find on major travel sites. At launch, ten airline and travel sites will be supported, many more will be added over time. See a flight you are interested in and bookmark it. The flight and fare information is then stored in your account at Yapta.

If you make a purchase by clicking through to the airline or travel site from Yapta, they’ll continue to monitor the price. If it falls, they’ll ping you and suggest you contact the airline for a refund or flight coupon. All airlines offer these on price drops but few consumers follow up. Yapta will help by reminding you.

Yapta grew to 5,000 users in private beta and is funded by $750K of angel financing.

Being a web site, the team is somewhat lucky. Their office is in Seattle, but their servers are out of Seatac (WA) and Texas. The engineers will surely be spending a sleepless night at the data center tonight.

I saw a pre-launch demo of the company yesterday from co-founder and CEO Tom Romary. The site, which should launch around May 15, helps users find deals on flights and (later this year) hotels.

Yapta is very different from other travel sites. It is not hooked up directly to airlines’ systems (as Expedia and Oribitz are), nor is it essentially a search engine for low fares like Farecast. Instead, they’re using some of the ideas behind del.icio.us and bookmarking to create a potentially compelling new way for people to search for cheap flights.

The core of the Yapta service is a browser bookmarklet or addon that lets users “bookmark” fares that they find on major travel sites. At launch, ten airline and travel sites will be supported, many more will be added over time. See a flight you are interested in and bookmark it. The flight and fare information is then stored in your account at Yapta.

Find a number of different flight options at different sites, and then go back to Yapta to compare them. This is particularly useful when you fly Southwest or Jetblue, which do not provide flight information to other services. If the fare increases or decreases before you make a purchase, that will be reflected on the Yapta site.

If you make a purchase by clicking through to the airline or travel site from Yapta, they’ll continue to monitor the price. If it falls, they’ll ping you and suggest you contact the airline for a refund or flight coupon. All airlines offer these on price drops but few consumers follow up. Yapta will help by reminding you.

The company has quite a few sources of revenue. They collect affiliate fees from most airlines and sites if the user clicks through and purchases a previously bookmarked flight. There will be some advertising on the site, and Yapta will offer information on Travelzoo-like “deals” to users who opt in. Finally, for customers who are eligible to receive flight coupons for price drops, Yapta will offer to do all the work to get the coupon for a 10% fee (or a flat yearly subscription fee of $40).

In beta testing with 275 users over the last several months, Yapta found that 34% of purchased tickets became eligible for a refund. The average refund was 16% of the ticket price, or $85. During the beta period that worked out to a total of $28,900 in aggregate potential refunds, or about $100 per beta user. If Yapta can successfully tap into this refund pool and get a share, the numbers look good. More importantly, this is a great service for consumers, who rarely even bother to check for price drops. Users can also use just this feature of Yapta by entering in the flight information on the Yapta site – they are not required to use the Yapta service for research or buying beforehand. For a lot of users, just this one aspect of the service will be very compelling.

I know I’ll be using it.

See Erick Schonfeld for more. He also saw the Yapta demo and wrote about it a couple of days ago.