Travel Technology - Beta testers for free flights-to-iCal utility wanted

Hello --

I've put together a small, free web site where you can enter your upcoming flights and get back an iCalendar file with your flight details. It's early days for the site, but if the functionality is something you're interested in, I'd be very eager to hear your comments.

The address is http://flightagenda.com/ -- thanks!

Marko

I'll try this later. I noticed gmail has gotten really good about reading itins from airlines (Expedia, UA, etc.) and offering to automatically add them to Gmail's calendar.

Too bad everything I do hinges on Outlook/work-email.

I think it's great that you've written a tool and offered it free to the FT community. Having said that, have you played around with tripit.com? I'm don't understand how your service would compare.

Robert

I've had terrible luck with Gmail and AA itins.

I like the tool, Markonen. I didn't know about TripIt. That totally rocks!

I already share my travel calendar in iCal. I'm more interested in getting flight details into it. I used to do it from the AA timetable on Palm, but I've moved on to a BB now.

Thanks! I'm aware of some big sites in the travel planning / itinerary sharing area. I guess my focus is on building a utility for the very frequent traveler -- the Flyertalker, actually. I imagine that the needs of that audience will always differ from those of the more occasional traveller, which is probably what most big sites will optimize for.

I opened flightagenda.com as soon as I had something semi-useful in place, so this focus may not be all that obvious yet. But it's already there, for example in the assumption that for my users, just typing in a flight number is quicker than any other type of data entry.

But I guess this is the question I'm most interested in: given a site that knows about all the flights you are going to take (and have taken), what kind of functionality would you like to see?

I do like the ability to add flights quickly. I don't always book my own flights and thus don't always get an itinerary that TripIt would like.

I'd love a way to capture the aircraft type and add the PNR.

I'll have to give it some more thought of what would be useful for that.

I'd love a way to capture the aircraft type and add the PNR.

I've now added the equipment type as an extra; you can see it if you keep your mouse pointer on top of the flight number. I hope to come up with a proper place for it eventually, but for now, I didn't want to clutter the interface with any more flight details.

For keeping track of PNRs, you could use the "Add note" feature for now.

Oh, and there's some new Google Maps integration in there as well!

But I guess this is the question I'm most interested in: given a site that knows about all the flights you are going to take (and have taken), what kind of functionality would you like to see?

In addition to Remove,Add Note, Show Map, you need: Edit. When you click Edit, it fills in the 5 entry boxes above with the flight details and lets you change them. When you make a mistake in typing the date, for example, this lets you fix the mistake easily.

Thought of this when I mis-typed a date on an entry. :)

Thanks, this looks like a neat utility. Some observations:

1. I agree our needs and wants are different than the average person. I don't like how wordy your traditional travel sites are when they port over data say to your calendar. I mean in a subject line for an entry I might want to see e.g.:
US2039 BOSDCA US-JJK87Q UA-CV9PjL
e.g. showing the flight number, city pair, the operating carrier PNR, and in this case say the booking airline PNR. Might also want the ticket number but not sure that would need to go in to the subject line. Curious also how it displays a code share flight.

2. It would be neat if you could integrate the data with
http://tripit.com
so a user would not have to manually enter in flight data.

3. One problem is that if you subscribe to an ICAL feed using Exchange and Outlook 2007, the internet calendar is kept in a different calendar/folder than that of the primary user. The biggest issue with this is that if you are using Active Sync with say a Windows Mobile device, it will not sync data over because it is not in the primrary calendar. This is actually how I came across your utility, I was trying to find a way to automatically merge "Internet Calendars" in Outlook so that the items go in to my main calendar. It seems like in Google Calendar you do see these merged calendars on the main screen. However, with Active Sync, you can't have a partnership set up with Exchange and Google Calendar.

You can manually I believe drag items from "Internet Calendar" in Outlook to your main calendar, but I would prefer something running perhaps on Exchange that would automatically pull any item in a subscribed and selected "Internet Calendar" and put it in my main calendar to facilitate that syncranization with my mobile device using Active Sync.

It is maddening that Microsoft did not put a checkbox when you subscribe to an ICAL feed to either keep it separate or intigrate the data with the main users Exchange or Outlook calendar.

Thanks again..