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First Round Capital's Howard Morgan paid Tech Confidential a visit this week to chat about some of his recent investments, including online travel service Yapta Inc.

After launching in May, the Seattle startup in July raised a $2.3 million Series A round led by First Round, the early-stage venture firm founded by Morgan and Josh Kopelman. Yapta has raised a total of $3 million, with its other investors including Bay Partners, Swiftsure Capital and Voyager Capital.

Yapta's name stands for "your amazing personal travel assistant," and while amazing may be a stretch, it's a clever Web site. As Morgan explained to me, if you use Yapta as the starting point in searching for affordable airplane tickets from, say, New York to Chicago (my home town) for Christmas, it tracks the prices of the flights you're interested in, lets you compare them and emails you if any of them change. If someone buys a ticket on a flight tagged through Yapta that later goes on sale, the service contacts them and helps request a refund or credit. The airlines typically honor these requests--minus fees, naturally--but few consumers are aware of the practice or take advantage of it. Morgan claims Yapta often saves him enough to upgrade to first class.

All that said, Yapta will succeed or fail based on how many people use it, and on that score it has work to do. Traffic and downloads on the site have been falling fairly steeply, according to Compete.com's blog. A Quantcast comparison also illustrates how competitive this sector is, with Yapta competing with such sites as Farecast, Farecompare and Airfarewatchdog, just to name a few of the many travel comparison services.

Still, too bad I booked my family's holiday tickets more than a month ago, before having had a chance to try Yapta. And on the admittedly slim chance that the seats will go on sale, I've entered all the relevant flight information on the site. So far, Yapta tells me, there are no vouchers or refunds available, but I've got my fingers crossed for an early Christmas present  - Mary Kathleen Flynn

See Howard Morgan's WayTooEarly blog
See list of First Round's portfolio companies
See Oct. 12 post on Howard Morgan from Tech Confidential
See July 10 press release from Yapta

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