[SimonRowberry]

Hi All,

For years I’ve been using the QuickOffice suite, first on my Nokia Communicator, then E90 and now on my iPhone. It’s extremely useful for reading and modifying Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents on the move.

A couple of weeks ago I received an email from QuickOffice for an app called WorldMate. The specification looked good, so I have invested the £9.00 (which makes it a relatively expensive iPhone app) and downloaded it.

One of its attractive features is its ability to keep all your itineraries in one place on the phone. However, once it was initialised, I discovered that one does this by emailing your booking confirmations (flight and hotels) to WorldMate who then (presumably manually) generate your itinerary for you. This concerns me for two reasons:

Firstly, WorldMate also has a hotel booking function, and I am concerned that I’ll get bombarded with emails recommending particular hotels once they know my preferences and travel plans. Their hotel booking engine is not competitive – I tried a dummy booking for the Holiday Inn in Leicester and it quoted me almost USD 300!

Secondly, sending confirmation emails to an “unknown” email address seems about as secure as posting dates and locator numbers on this Forum! I have an inherent distrust of storing any sensitive data remotely (I even limit what I back up to MobileMe) – and please don’t reopen the wretched SwissDisk debate on the back of this comment, either!!

I wonder whether anyone else is using this app, what their views are, and whether or not I’ve bought a turkey of an app.

Many thanks as ever, Simon

[Anonymous]

[BABenji]

Good afternoon Simon,

Can I ask why you do not save your itineraries to your e-calendar, in my case Outlook, in your case…i don’t know what Apple uses? When I book flights and hotels (primarily with BA and IHG) and the confirmation arrives in the inbox, there is an option of saving the details to your calendar, which saves flight number, time etc and hotel confirmation numbers, as well as hotel address (great for showing the taxi driver when no matter how slowly you say Marriott Asian Side, they don’t comprehend).

BA also sets a check-in reminder 24 hours before departure in the calendar as well.

This obviously sync’s with your iphone (or whatever your weapon of choice may be) and your itineraries are with you while on the move.

[SimonRowberry]

Hi Benji,

Thanks for this.

I already do as you suggest – using iCal on my Macs and then to iPhone using MobileMe to sync it all. However, out of the carriers and hotels I regularly use, to date only LX (and Swiss railways) seem to give the direct exporting function that you refer to, to iCal on Macs. I have to manually copy my Hilton, Starwood, Finnair, Lufty stuff into iCal (unless I’m missing something obvious here, of course).

The attraction of WorldMate was that I might’ve avoided this manual data entry stuff, whilst not presenting myself with a data security risk. It seems that I was wrong…

As I say, if I’ve missed something with the other carriers/hoteliers reservation formats, then I’d be delighted to know.

Thanks again for your help, Simon

[BABenji]

Regrettably not being a Mac user, I can’t comment further. There would appear to be discrimination by Hilton, for example, as I can add my reservations to my Outlook from their confirmation emails/my HHonors account. Hilton also allows reservations to be added to Google Calendar, which may be an option for a remote store of all your itineraries; assuming that other carriers/hotels can work with this system.

I would say if you are manually adding itineries presently and you are concerned about a security risk, continue to do so and put the £9 down to experience.

That said, there are better men/women than me on here who may be able to shed more light on how Apple users can have a more convenient, seamless system. Given the popularity of Apple products I would be amazed if the Hilton’s, Starwoods etc of this world don’t have some way of working with iCal.

Would like to help more, but can’t. Sorry.

[MartynSinclair]

Hi Simon

I am a Windows user not Apple

I used to use an electronic diary via Blackberry synching with Outlook. However, as I use a different Outlook box for each company, it casued me no end of issues as diary entries were being erased when synching. Multibox synching is a blackberry issue, but not an apple issue.

Now, I have made my diary entires easy. I have a principle Outlook box which has all my schedules, itineraries, meetings, rostas, personal time etc. It does not looked muddled as everything is colour coordinated which makes it far simpler. I looked at apps and diary programmes, but from being paper free, I have completed the circle as I am now working off a printed Outook diary which organises my life so much better and far clearer.

I hope that this helps.

[SimonRowberry]

Hi Folks,

Interestingly, I’ve just had a personal email from WorldMate, addressing my concerns. I’ve not yet had chance to look at the points in detail, but it does at least suggest that they have a customer care orientation if they are prepared to follow up a post here, dig out my email address and then send me a personal email addressing my concerns within a couple of hours of my posting.

Also, I’m impressed that they haven’t posted a “Look what we’ve done and how good we are” self-congratulatory message on here.

A certain Helvetic-named storage company could learn a few lessons from this!!

Regards and happy Sunday lunches to all, Simon

[SimonRowberry]

In fact, I’ll post the email, and we’ll also forgive them for getting the name of the Forum wrong…..

“Hello Simon,

I was directed to your comment of the flyer talk forum here and wanted to get the chance to address some of your concerns.

· WorldMate does not manually create itineraries, they are automatically created by our itinerary parsing engine, no person at WorldMate or otherwise will ever see your personal details. In addition our privacy practices and statements are certified by TRUSTe, you can read more about that here: http://clicktoverify.truste.com/pvr.php?page=validate&url=http://www.worldmate.com&sealid=101

· About our Hotel bookings function; you will never get “bombarded” with emails recommending a particular hotel, however if you do have a trip planned and have no hotel booked WorldMate will remind you within existing confirmation emails and never for a specific brand. With regards to the high-price you encountered, I would be very interested to hear more details, our hotel booking are provided by hotels.com who generally have a best-price guarantee.

Please feel free to contact me about any other problems or concerns that you may have.

Many thanks,

Ze’ev

_________________________________
Ze’ev Rosenstein | Director, Product Marketing
WorldMate”

Fair play to them!

Simon

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