The Hipmunk Flight And Hotel Search Mobile App Now Features Calendar Integration
April 7, 2012
Hipmunk, a service that "takes the agony out" of flight and hotel searching, has recently added calendar access into their mobile app. A first for a travel company, this integration will help travelers make better decisions, plus reduce planning time and effort.
When looking for travel accommodations, you typically take a mental note of appointments, tasks, and so on beforehand or flip back and forth between your calendar app and search app to avoid schedule conflicts. To remove this tedious step, Hipmunk has integrated calendar data, a feature which shows your schedule alongside search results and warns of any conflicts.
“With mobile calendar integration, we are immediately saving users from toggling between apps, calendars and search results—cutting out thousands of hours of agony. And we are thrilled to be the first travel company to allow this type of unique personalization,” said Adam Goldstein, Hipmunk CEO. “We’re dedicated to solving actual travel planning problems, and from personal experience, we understand how agonizing it can be finding the right flight between two meetings or the best hotel within walking distance to the day’s first meeting.“Included in Hipmunk for iOS v2.2, the calendar feature is available for both flight and hotel searches, though implemented in different ways. In flight results, vertical lines indicate when your personal and work events occur and a blatant conflict warning will appear in the flight details if it overlaps a scheduled event. For hotels, calendar event flags help you decide which location would be the most efficient. Because not everyone may feel the calendar overlay is always necessary, Hipmunk has made the feature very easily enabled or disabled before performing any search. In addition, you can choose which calendars Hipmunk displays by tapping the page curl at the bottom-right of the hotel results map or the settings icon, the gear, in the bottom-left of the flight results chart. Hipmunk Flight & Hotel Search is a universal app compatible with iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch running iOS 4.3 or later, and available in the App Store as a free download.