How Executive Assistants Save Time and Improve Travel

Many of our users are aided by an executive assistant who helps arrange their trips. In the past, these assistants used to edit and print out paper itineraries for their bosses, as well as manually input the flight and hotel information into Outlook for the travelers to be able to use it on their BlackBerry. This is of course a rather tedious process, that breaks down very easily - whether it is because plans have changed, in which case those paper itineraries become useless and even misleading, or because every tiny mistake - wrong flight time, terminal number or address - could lead to travel crises.

Using WorldMate, personal assistants can now significantly improve on this - save time and effort, reduce errors and improve their communications with the traveler. Isn't that what technology is for?

If you want to understand the whole process and all the benefits - read this. If you're convinced already and just want to know how to use it - just scroll down...

Step I: WorldMate Automatically Gets The Travel Details From Bookings

First - WorldMate automates the process of itinerary creation. What it does is capture the travel details directly off the travel booking confirmation emails. It uses these to auto-create a comprehensive itinerary. And it organizes the items by time - regardless of the timezones. Like this:

Step II: WorldMate Adds the Meetings and Fixes the Times

Next - WorldMate adds the meetings that the traveler has while traveling to the itinerary. What it does this, it fixes the time-zone issues - so everything is presented according to the destination time-line. What you get is a sort of travel calendar where you can see your travel timeline - first you take the flight, then you pick up the rental car, then you go to your meeting etc. All of these are presented as one, conclusive travel itinerary. You can have the meetings added automatically - if you already put them in the scheduling system (e.g. Outlook), or add them manually on the www.worldmate.com website. The entire itinerary is available there automatically. It is easily editable, automatically appears on the travelers' BlackBerry or iPhone (see below), and you can easily print it out on the www.worldmate.com website. Here's an itinerary with meetings added automatically:

Step III: WorldMate Checks All the Addresses And Creates a Map

When you travel, having the right address is crucial. If you don't have it - you're lost. Furthermore it is so convenient if you can see in advance where you're going and how to get from place to place. Well, this is exactly what WorldMate does for you. You - or your traveler - can then click the Map in the www.worldmate.com website to see everything on one map - the airport, the hotel, the meetings - they're all there. Here's how an itinerary looks like on the map - you can see the airport, hotel and meeting (and even the rental car office is hiding there...):

Step IV: WorldMate Puts the Itinerary On The Traveler's Phone!

As soon as there's an itinerary in the system, it is automatically synchronized with the traveler's BlackBerry or iPhone - the same way Outlook is automatically synchronized with the calendar on the phone. So your traveler has all the details - without you having to do anything. If you add or change something, or if they do - it gets to their phone automatically, just like it does from Outlook (or Lotus Notes if you're using that). No hassle, no work!

  

Step V: WorldMate Puts the Flights and Hotels in Outlook Too!

Most PA's are used to putting the traveler's information into Outlook / Lotus. This is a tedious process - whether you need to copy and paste the flight and hotel information, or whether you get a file you need to save into Outlook (and then check it made it there OK) - it's just a hassle. With WorldMate and the BlackBerry - the whole process is automated. You just forward those confirmation emails to the WorldMate system - and the info gets to the calendar automatically. You don't need to do anything (the traveler needs to enable this on his BlackBerry when asked to). So WorldMate just saved you a whole lot of typing - that you'd have had to do again and again if schedules changed.

 

Step VI: WorldMate Helps You find The Right Hotel

How do you find a hotel that meets your traveler's preference AND is near the meetings he's attending? Easy. WorldMate lets you search for hotels on a map, and finds the hotels that meet your travelers preference - budget, star quality, brand etc. You can even select a meeting that was (automatically) entered in the system, and it will search for a hotel near that meeting. And once you book it - it's immediately added to the itinerary. No fuss! Learn all about WorldMate's hotel booking facilities here.

So - how should an executive assistant use WorldMate?

The way WorldMate works is that every traveler has an account. So your boss either has an account, or should open one at www.worldmate.com (and download the mobile app to his phone). His / her account name is his email address - say john.smith@acme.com . To get his travel bookings into the system, he can forward the confirmation emails from that address. But it's easy to expect that he'd want you to do it. How is that done? There's two ways to do it.

One way, is to add your email address to his account. This way, when the system gets an email from you, it understands it should go into his account. To do this:

• Sign into the travelers' account on www.worldmate.com - you can just click here. You'd need his/her email address and password.
• Click "My Account" on the top right
• Click the blue "Email Addresses" button
• Put your own email address in the "Add Email Address" box and click "Add"

From now on - you can just forward the confirmation emails you get to trips@worldmate.com . The system will recognize the emails coming from you and put them in your traveler's itinerary.

You can make this even easier by using the WorldMate Outlook Add-in. This will enable you to send emails and even meetings into WorldMate with one click.

You'd need to download and install the Outlook Add-in on your PC, which you can do here - WorldMate Outlook Add-in Download. Download, open the file and run it (close Outlook first).

Once you re-open Outlook, you'll have a new toolbar:

To prepare it for action, you need to configure it with your traveler's WorldMate ID. All you need to do is:

• Sign into the travelers' account on www.worldmate.com - you can just click here. You'd need his/her email address and password.
• Click "My Account" on the top right
• Click the blue "Email Addresses" button
• Look at the "Your WorldMate Live email address". It contains an address that looks like this 1234567890@worldmatelive.com . Just copy this address or write it on a piece of paper.
• Then - in your Outlook, click the "Menu" button on the WorldMate toolbar (shown above - left-most button). You'll see this screen:

• Put the email address you copied below in the white box, and click "Save"

That's all. From now on, whenever you get a booking confirmation email - all you need to do is click the "Export Item" button and it will go directly into your traveler's WorldMate itinerary. And if you want to log into the website to do more - simply click the "WorldMate Live" button.

Questions? Suggestions? Just comment below!

Comments

[Athena Katsakos]

I have tried at least 4 times today to send via the VirtuallyThere site emailed to myself and my manager to trips@worldmate.com. Carlson Wagonlit is our travel service provider. On each occassion I rec'd from Worldmate a cannot add due to a 'glitch' on your end. How do I find out what the 'glitch' is and to rectify it. Thank you, Athena (exec. assistant)

[Ayelet@WorldMate]

Dear Athena Katsakos,

Your confirmation email links to a password protected itinerary page. In this case you should click on the link, log-in to the itinerary page and use the “E-mail itinerary” option to send the confirmation mail to yourself. Upon receiving it, forward it from your email address to trips@worldmate.com

In general the process of exporting VirtuallyThere confirmation emails is straight forward:
* Simply forward the confirmation mail you’ve received from Virtuallythere to ‘trips@worldmate.com’ with no additions or changes.
* Leave the original subject line unaltered as well.
* In case this fails (because of password protection)follow the above procedure.

[Will]

I have to say I really love WorldMate...its great for my Blackberry Bold 9000.

A couple of nice to having things:
- A way to check your Frequent Flyer points/miles (love to know when I can get an upgrade), I guess being able to request an upgrade from the app would go hand and hand here.
- The ability to check out from a hotel via the app (it would be great if I could check out while eating breakfast rather than forgetting to do it from the room since a lot of the big chains let you do it via the internet now).

[Nadav]

Thanks Will. Good points!
On our Facebook Page at http://www.facebook.com/WorldMate we have set up discussion threads about the different apps. We'd be honored to have you as the first commenter on the BlackBerry App there!

[Roger Colbeck]

I briefly tried Worldmate, but unless I missed it, it seems to be missing the one key feature that I wanted - the ability to add my flight/hotel itinerary back into Outlook calendar. Not all booking sites provide Outlook compatible calendar entries (or the import ability) so I was looking for a tool that would take itineraries from any source and allow me to get them back into Outlook. I'm now using a competitive product to Worldmate to do this, as well as to build up a set of itinerary pages (much like Worldmate does) on my iPhone. It is just that I really do like to have important flight details also in my Outlook (and by extension on my iPhone calendar with normal syncing) calendar.

..Roger

[Nadav]

As explained above - WorldMate automatically adds the flights and hotels to the itinerary. It does it via the BlackBerry. After the itinerary is synchronized with the BlackBerry, those details migrate to Outlook, Lotus Notes or whatever other scheduling system is used.

This solution is not yet available for iPhone because Apple doesn't open the device calendar to 3rd party application access.

[Donna]

I work for two gentlemen who have WorldMate Accounts. I create and manage their itineraries. Is it true that I can only register my email address with one of their accounts? How can I put information into both of their calendars when I only have one email address?

[Marc]

Hi can you use a sucriber calendar to put the info in iphone, you can add it to your calendar preferences. Hope it helps

[Virtual Assistants India]

Nice post.
Blackberry is awesome phone

[jordan 12]

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[billige mobiler]

Glad to see it worked for you. Nice post:-)-Ray-

[vimax]

I make it to my android version