Plan Your Trip Right Within Your Calendar Application

Don't you feel your browser has too many tabs opened to manage your email accounts, your calendar and contacts? And still, all those tabs make are not sufficient to perform all your planning and contacts management. If this is your case, you must be interested in trying out BlueTie - a hosted web-based email, calendar and contacts management application working right within one tab of your browser and actually providing you with an additional recently introduced option of planning your trips right within the same application. This option is available by means of integration with Orbitz - the number three travel website based on gross travel bookings.

Suppose, you have received an email from a customer indicating that he would like to meet you in a certain town for a presentation. You simply click "Book Travel" button right within your calendar and Orbitz searches for available flights and displays them right within your calendar so that you will see if any flight overlaps with your current task or meeting. You can view further details for any flight, sort them using a number of variables such as price and date and eventually make your choice. In the very same way you can book a room in a hotel based on the flight arrangement you've made. What is actually appealing about this recent integration is that BlueTie users will have Orbitz' global access to flights from more than 400 airlines, rooms at more than 65,000 hotel and lodging properties, and 13 rental car companies.

We all know that other web-based email and calendar applications rely on banner ads or context-based text ads to deliver marketing messages and product offerings to users. At the same time, BlueTie's Featuretisements serve both users and advertisers by providing relevant functionality, like travel planning tools, to users while simultaneously providing advertisers with access to new customers.

Honestly, I don't understand why an already paid-for application (although the free version of BlueTie is good enough for an independent user or a small enterprise willing to use a hosted email application) should be further monetized but this way seems to be more valuable to a user than any monetization model I've ever seen anyway. In fact, it does resemble any simple affiliate program but much more sophisticated in its implementation and actually useful to a user. It is also based on action performed by a user (in this event booking a flight, a room in a hotel or renting a car) but for a user it means access to all the information he needs to plan a trip eliminating the need to visit other specialized traveling websites.

I'm not sure if it will be a good reason for other prospective customers to migrate from their current Gmail and Google calendar accounts. But I believe this is only the first step in a row for BlueTie and the company will continue to add other useful functionality for its users (and thus to add further monetization opportunities for itself). But it also makes me wonder if larger players such as Google will follow the same direction as well.