When you’re travelling a lot for work, it can be a pain in the neck dealing with all the travel information such as flight itinerary, hotel confirmations and even restaurant reservations. Google Calendar aims to make this easier by automatically adding all that information in for Google Apps users.
Its a feature Google is rolling out to its Calendar service for Google Apps accounts in the coming week. When someone receives an email in their work Gmail account for a flight, hotel, restaurant or ticketed event, Google Calendar will be able to extract specific details such as flight numbers and check-in times directly add them in as an events entry.
It is even intuitive enough to update events with new details if plans change and a new email is received about a particular flight or hotel booking. Google hopes this will save time for frequent business travellers as they won’t have to waste time copying and pasting that information into a calendar entry themselves.
The feature will be enabled on the desktop, iOS and Android versions of Google Calendar for all Google Apps customers except for Google Apps for Government users. It is a progressive rollout and notification will be displayed in Calendar once the features is activated on a user’s account.
[Via Google Apps Update]
Comments
6 responses to “Google Calendar Is Now Intuitive Enough To Automatically Add Business Travel Information”
It’s still not very good with timezones!
Isn’t this what TripIt does? Only you don’t need to be a Google Apps user?
TripIt doesn’t scrape your Gmail for the information, you actually have to forward it to an email address. Plus it doesn’t put it directly onto Google Calendar. It just puts it all in one big master itinerary.
It’s a matter of preference, I suppose.
You can set TripIt up to scrape your Gmail account. Why on earth you’d trust it to do that is beyond me.
Google already does this for personal gmail though? For years?
It doesn’t seem to handle amendments to flights very well (e.g. if the airline changes your flight time or if you change to another flight). Otherwise it’s pretty good.