Just in time for the holiday travel season, Google announced that Inbox users can share all the details of their trips with one tap. Shareable Trip Bundles will start rolling out to iOS and Android users this week.
For business users, shareable Trip Bundles make it easy to forward all your travel information, including flight, hotel and rental car details, with anyone with an email address. This helps make it easier to plan and coordinate business trips and travel logistics.
Announced earlier this summer, Trip Bundle is an intelligent feature of Inbox that works in a similar way to Google Now. Trip Bundle pulls all your trip information into one spot in Inbox and provides you with updates, including changes to flight status. Prior to Trip Bundles, travelers had to manage separate emails for different elements of their trip. Trip Bundles aggregate your flight, hotel and rental car reservations in one location, so you have a built-in itinerary in your inbox without needing to search.
What is Trip Bundle?
"When it's time to fly, Inbox will even update your flight status so you'll know if your trip is on time or if your gate has changed," Google said at the time, in a statement. "You can open the bundle to see all your emails related to that trip, with the most important information (like flight times) right at the top."
Even if Inbox doesn't automatically recognize an email as part of a trip, you can now manually add messages to your Trip Bundle. Users can use the "Move to" feature to move individual emails to a Trip Bundle. Information within a Trip Bundle will appear at the top of your Inbox, and the emails related to your trip will be available for offline viewing.
For business users who travel frequently, the feature can save you time so that you don't have to search for specific emails related to your hotel reservations, rental car confirmation or airline ticket information.
Trip Bundle is designed to compete with existing services that scan your emails to pull all your relevant travel information into organized trips. These include Sabre's TripCase, Concur's TripIt and BlackBerry's Travel. Microsoft is also using Cortana to surface relevant travel information just before your trip.
With Inbox integration, the benefit is that you no longer need a third-party service to scan your email, and mobile users no longer need to install another app on their device.
Shareable Trip Bundle makes it easy to not only share your trips with others, but also makes it easier to coordinate trips with colleagues.
- Read our review of Google Apps
