Booking site integrates your calendar in travel searches
— -- If you don't have an administrative assistant, you're often on your own when trying to reconcile flight schedules with business meetings or appointments.
And, when you travel to an unfamiliar city and have multiple appointments at various venues scattered across town, it can be difficult figuring out the optimum location for your hotel stay.
Now, along comes Hipmunk, the flight- and hotel-search site, with some crafty solutions.
Hipmunk has been praised for taking often-complicated flight and hotel-search results and presenting them in a user-friendly, visually appealing way.
In its newest feature, the site is trying to take the agony out of coordinating flight and meeting schedules by integrating Google Calendar into its flight- and hotel-search results. Hipmunk claims its Google Calendar integration may be a first for online travel companies.
With the service, you no longer have to toggle between Google Calendar and travel search results to figure out the best time to fly or most convenient hotel location.
When you search for a flight, Hipmunk displays all your scheduled meetings along with flight schedules, illustrating where they conflict. So, for example, it is easy to see that you'd better reconsider that United Airlines flight at 7:55 a.m. from San Francisco to Washington Dulles because the 4:01 p.m. scheduled arrival time butts up against that 3 p.m., all-important phone call you have scheduled with investors.
One particularly handy feature of Hipmunk's Google Calendar integration is the "No Conflicts" button that takes your scheduled events into account and excludes any conflicting flights from your search.
There are other helpful tweaks. If you have multiple Google Calendars, perhaps one personal and one for work, you can decide which calendars or even which particular meetings to show.
In addition, if you run a small business and are coordinating co-workers' flights or booking airline tickets for family and friends, they can give you access to their Google Calendars, and Hipmunk will integrate their schedules and display them when you search for flights.
On the downside, a lot of business people are more likely to be using Microsoft Outlook Calendar than Google Calendar. Hipmunk CEO Adam Goldstein says the site started with Google Calendar because a majority of Hipmunk users have Google accounts, but he said he would consider incorporating other calendars in the future.
Hipmunk's Google Calendar integration also works for hotels, although it isn't quite as user-friendly as flight search.
While the Hipmunk flight search with Google Calendar is based on schedules, the foundation of the hotel search is hotel and meeting locations.
So if you are searching for hotels in Manhattan, Hipmunk displays all of your meetings in chronological order as numbered pins on a map, and displays the hotels closest to each meeting or event.
If you have three or four scheduled meetings one day, you can mouse over a list of your meetings on the right side of the map, and then the pin on the map representing that meeting gets highlighted for easier viewing.
Say you have a 9 a.m. meeting at Gracie Mansion on the Upper East Side and a 1:30 p.m. luncheon with partners at Carmine's Restaurant in the theater district, you can view the closest hotels to each location and decide which hotel would make for the most convenient stay.
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