Forward any travel booking to one email address, get back perfect calendar events. The unglamorous problem nobody had properly solved.
Booked, but not in your calendar
Everyone who travels knows this small, recurring annoyance. You book a flight, a hotel, a train, and the confirmation lands in your inbox, but it's not in your calendar, so you either copy the details across by hand or quietly hope you'll remember. Google and Apple both claim to do this for you automatically, and sometimes they do. But the moment a booking is forwarded to you, comes from a smaller airline, or arrives as a PDF attachment, the magic quietly fails and you're back to typing it in yourself.
Forward a booking, get a calendar
TravelCalendar.me fixes that, and the whole thing fits in one sentence: forward your booking confirmation to a dedicated address, and a few seconds later you get a reply with calendar files you can drop straight into Google, Apple, or anything else. No app to install. No account to make. It reads the email (and any PDF stuck to it, right down to a densely formatted airline ticket), works out exactly what you booked, and sends back tidy events. It handles seven kinds of booking in a single email: flights (including multi-leg trips, with an event per leg), hotels and Airbnbs, car hire, trains, buses, restaurant reservations, and tours.
Why time zones are the whole game
Here's the part I obsessed over, and the reason it's better than the built-in version: time zones. Almost everything in this space gets them wrong, and a flight in the wrong time zone is worse than no flight at all: it'll tell you to be at the airport at the wrong hour. So the system never trusts a UTC offset stuffed into a date. It pulls the local time and the actual zone separately, verifies the zone is real, enriches it with airport data, and only then builds a timezone-aware event. If it can't be certain, it deliberately falls back to a plain floating time rather than confidently telling you the wrong thing. It would genuinely rather be modest than wrong.
And if it ever can't find a booking, it tells you so, plainly, instead of leaving you wondering. You're never silently dropped.
Two AI models, picking it apart
The first version was deliberately minimal: a stateless service that did one job and held onto nothing — no database, no stored emails, every request self-contained. (The original email-ingestion piece was first built by Webber Takken, before I took the project on and built out the pipeline around it.) It's now being rebuilt from the ground up into a fuller product with a proper dashboard, which meant putting the rebuild through several rounds of adversarial review — two separate AI models independently picking holes in the entire codebase against a spec before anything went live — until there were no blockers left. That's an unusual amount of rigour for what started as a tool to scratch my own travel-admin itch, but the whole point of it is to be the thing you can trust without thinking, and trust has to be earned in the boring details.
