Only a few days back we discussed about trip planning and itinerary management apps. Apps like TripIt and Trip38 are a boon to business travellers because they save the hassle of managing all the bookings and tickets separately and neatly organise them in one place. Google tried to eat into the pie of these services with Google Inbox earlier. Google Inbox automatically sorts emails and instead of the subject line, shows the highlights of each message and that works for travel information as well. It even manages to figure out which message belongs to which trip and groups them seperately.
You won’t have to manually enter travel details with the new Google Calendar
Now that Google has already been reading the mails and is capable of skimming through the data, they decided to take a step further and build that functionality into the Google Calendar. So the days when you have to manually enter data to create calendar entries are gone. Now the Google Calendar will keep an eye on its sibling Gmail and keep picking information related to flights, hotels etc. to be added into the Calendar. This will not only include the date of travel but other information like flight number and check in timings as well.
Once you receive the email confirmation in your mailbox, the information will be added to the Calendar with a reminder. If there is a change in the schedule and your mailbox has a new mail about the rescheduling or cancellation, it will be updated in the calendar as well without any manual intervention. Even in case of a shared calendar, the added events remain private to the user.
The new feature will available by default on desktop and mobile apps for both Android and iOS. Users can choose to disable it from their Google Calendar settings if they aren’t interested in the feature. Google will start rolling out the feature sometime in the month of September.
