How the new Inbox application by Google can help you do better with your travel planning
5:52 AM
Google released a new
application called “Inbox”, the application is designed to help you be more
productive with your emails. ‘Inbox’ is basically a new interface that sits on
top of your Gmail. The new interface treats the stream of emails as a to-do
list, and defines a set of operations to help you deal with each mail as if it
was a task.
Some of ‘Inbox’ features
were designed specifically to help you be more productive with your travel
planning, while some other generic features are perfect to utilize while you
are traveling. Check them out:
Travel bundle
‘Inbox’ comes with a readymade
bundle called “Travel”, ‘Bundle’ is a main feature in Inbox that is supposed to
help you be more productive. Users can create new ‘Bundles’ and can configure
per ‘Bundle’ which emails will be aggregated in this ‘Bundle’. Here’s how the
Travel bundle works:
·
The Travel bundle comes with a readymade group of rules that were
set in a way that emails received from hotels suppliers and airlines carriers
will be automatically aggregated into the ‘Travel Bundle’. You can also manually
add emails that weren’t aggregated automatically to the bundle.
·
For each ‘Bundle’ users can configure whether to receive a push notification
whenever a new email arrives to this specific ‘Bundle’. The ‘Travel Bundle’ “Notification”
is set by default to 'YES', so whenever you get a new email that belongs to the
bundle you will get a push notification. The ‘Travel Bundle’ comes with a
little purple icon of an airplane, so when you get a new email related to your
travel planning you will see the airplane icon on your notification bar as part
of the mail notification. If you want, you can disable the notification for the
bundle.
·
Mails that are classified to a 'Bundle' will not be shown on the main
mail stream and instead the 'Bundle' will be presented. Per 'Bundle' you can
define when to present it on your inbox stream. For the Travel ‘Bundle’ the
default is “As message arrives” but you have the option to change it by selecting
from other optional presets. This feature helps to reduce noise from your inbox
stream so that certain mails will appear on your stream only once a day or even
once a week.
Reminders
‘Inbox’ lets you set reminders;
there are two main use cases for reminders:
·
You can attach reminder to mail, which is very useful when you are
planning your trip, so not only you will get a reminder but you will get it
with the mail in context which is especially useful when you are planning your
trip and have to follow booking approvals from airlines, car rental services
and hotels.
·
You can also set new reminders directly by clicking the ‘+’ button
on the main screen. Reminders can be set based on date and time but you may also
set a reminder based on a location, which can be very useful when you travel at
your destination and want to check something in the context of a specific
place.
Highlights
Some of the emails on
your inbox will be highlighted so you won’t have to open the mail to see what’s
in it, mails with information about flights will be automatically highlight and
will present real-time status of the flight. Cool!
To get started with
‘Inbox’ you will need to get an invitation, here’s how you can get one:
·
Users who were invited by Google, can forward an invitation to 3 other
people, so if you know someone who got an invitation you can ask him for one.
But there’s also a
workaround you can follow in order to start using Inbox without an invite, read
all about it here.
Enjoy, and keep
traveling!
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