Google Inbox Helps Ease Travel Planning and On-The-Go-ing

before you ask, i’m sorry, i don’t have any invites 🙁

i’ve written in the past about how much Google helps me out when making travel plans and when i’m on the go (maps & cards, translate), and it looks like their new Inbox Gmail app and website are continuing that trend. unfortunately at the moment you need an invitation to get access to them (which you can request from their website, or ask an “in-crowd” friend who didn’t already give their 3 away).

thanks to a tip from a Gizmodo article, i decided to check this out. it looks like both the app and the website support these features:

if you search for “my next flight” it will pull up your next flight:

clicking into that “Open original email” link, you get a prettified parsed summary at the top, before the actual email itself:

summaries appear before many travel-related emails:

but unfortunately it doesn’t look like it’s able to parse most Orbitz emails — i just get the plain email view when i pull up almost all of my Orbitz flights, even just simple round-trip flights.

for those that it is able to parse, though, you do get some additional features, like a scrolling summary of your flights when on the message list view:

this also works with hotel (and airbnb) reservations, even parsing the email to give you a map!

these are similar to the upcoming travel notification cards you get in the Google Now. alas, i am not sure i’m a big enough Google Inbox user at the moment since my inbox is actually quite manageable (i think?) and all the extra cruft it gives you in an attempt to help you organize your email-centric life is a bit too much for me — way too many taps/clicks required to do the simple things i need. still, these are pretty cool features!