Worldmate is a clever travel organizer which talks to Outlook.
One of the tedious parts of travelling is entering all the details into Outlook calendar. Typing in flights, hotels etc is a pain but necessary because once in Outlook the details will appear anywhere you have the calendar synced like a smartphone.
Worldmate is one way around this typing tedium. It’s an online service which takes your emailed booking confirmations (from airlines, hotels etc) and automatically converts them into an itinerary.
Once you have a confirmed Worldmate account, email your booking confirmation emails to trips@worldmate.com and it’ll read the text, figure out the details and insert them into an itinerary. The parsing of emails works quite well and even accepts PDF attachments from supported companies. It’s always worth checking the imported details, in our tests there were some omissions. If your travel agents itinerary isn’t accepted try the ‘GDS’ web sites that let you look at bookings directly – we have a 2002 article on these sites.
That itinerary can show up on Apple, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry devices via a free app. The apps can connect to LinkedIn and Facebook, check weather as destination, check flight status and other goodies.
The Welcome message from Worldmate might get caught by your Outlook spam filter, look in the Junk Email folder to find it and confirm your email address/account.
Add to Outlook calendar
Worldmate sounds nice enough but at Office Watch we’re interested in how you can get those details into our Outlook calendar.
To do that, and get other extras, you need a Gold account which costs US$9.90 for a year. You can get 3 months access free by booking a hotel via their web site.
The import into Outlook is done via the standard iCal system. Go to Worldmate.com and login. There’s a Calendar sync link on the home page or choose a trip then select ‘Calendar sync’ on the right, near the top of the page.
Then choose ‘Microsoft Outlook’ and then the ‘Add Calendar to Outlook’ button. Outlook will prompt for confirmation that you want to import the calendar. A separate calendar will appear in Outlook that you can view separately, side-by-side or merged/overlay with other calendars.
It’s the same iCal system that we mentioned a few months ago for the London Olympics.
The main benefit of using iCal is that any changes to your itineraries on Worldmate will be automatically reflected in Outlook.
However the imported details have some problems. We were disappointed that the all important confirmation code isn’t included in the iCal details. In many cases the confirmation/booking/PNR/eticket code is essential to sort out a travel problem so you want it immediately available.
But the biggest problem is incomplete time zone support. As you can see in the above example, Outlook shows the wrong arrival time because there’s a summer time hour difference between Sydney and Brisbane. The appointment time zone setting isn’t used. Almost all the flights we imported had time zone related errors. The iCal data from WorldMate doesn’t have proper time zone information. Those problems make the Outlook import/iCal more dangerous than useful.
Outlook add-in
Worldmate does have an Outlook add-in which makes it a little faster to forward emails or export existing calendar item to the online service.
Unfortunately, it’s not compatible with Outlook 2010 and presumably Outlook 2013 too.
Worldmate is rightly very popular and well worth $10 a year for regular travellers to save typing in travel details alone.
But the Outlook integration is poor unless you only travel in a single time zone!
