Hipmunk's new travel tool offers aid to small offices

— -- If you're an executive assistant, office manager or just the one who ends up planning all your company's travel, then Hipmunk has a nifty solution to help resolve your coordination woes.

The new tool, Hipmunk Business Class, also could be a viable option if you're pulling together a girls' weekend or shaping up travel plans for a family reunion.

Business Class, from the San Francisco-based air and hotel search start-up, lets a travel coordinator view every traveler's schedule by integrating their Outlook and Google calendars so he can send them e-mails to get their decisions on their various flight and hotel options.

The feature, which was introduced July 23, is Hipmunk's first subscription service. It's available for free for a 60-day trial, then costs $9.99 a month for each person.

Here's how it works:

The office's travel coordinator creates an account on Hipmunk.com and adds each traveler, the person's e-mail addresses, and flight and hotel preferences. It can be done from the Hipmunk home page or even flight and hotel search results pages.

As the coordinator searches for flights and hotels for colleagues' upcoming out-of-town conferences or meetings, he can view their Outlook and Google calendar schedules to help decide which choices mesh with their plans.

The coordinator picks flight segments and hotel options for each traveler, then selects "send decision." That e-mails the possible choices to the traveler to approve or reject.

The coordinator also can tack a message onto each e-mail to provide additional guidance.

If travelers don't like the flight and hotel choices they receive, they can send their own selections back to the coordinator with a link to rerun the search.

Using Hipmunk Business Class can save time and reduce mistakes in planning travel by eliminating the need for multiple phone calls and potentially confusing back-and-forth e-mails.

But the travel still needs to be booked. And Business Class offers a couple ways of doing that.

The travel coordinator starts by opening a pane that lists all the travelers he is serving and views a check mark next to each approved flight or hotel option.

Hipmunk provides links to third-party websites where the coordinator can book the travel that the travelers have chosen. Or, the coordinator can view the booking options and links from the travelers' e-mails.

Hipmunk's history

Hipmunk, a flight and hotel comparison-shopping site, arrived on the scene in 2010. It streamlined the way travelers search for flights and hotels by eliminating voluminous impractical and seemingly onerous choices.

The Business Class tool takes a similar tack in easing coordination headaches for office travel planners.

There are some cautions, however.

For the employee, Hipmunk Business Class isn't as easy as just phoning the company's travel agent or booking trips using the company's self-booking tool.

It's geared for travel coordinators at smaller firms that don't have their own travel agencies or employee self-booking options.

Also, there are a few less-than-seamless operational aspects of Hipmunk Business Class.

It doesn't immediately recognize whether an employee uses Google Calendar or Outlook. But it will recognize which one is in use after the travel coordinator selects the proper one.