I Link You

Using Google Calendar to organize group travel destinations

Due to the short time allotted to the Paris Social Sciences Program, many students felt inclined to make use of their free weekends to travel to other European countries or other regions of France. This past weekend, three of my friends and I headed out to the Champagne region of France for a short two-day trip. Before leaving for the trip, we used email, word-of-mouth, and email mailing lists. We did not receive any response, but we’ve gotten many questions about our trip upon our return.

One friend (who I will call AK) suggested using Google Calendar as a way to organize when and where other students are going during the weekends and the free week. AK often uses Google calendar to coordinate plans with her roommate. They would share a calendar marked with their course schedules, club meetings, appointments, etc. One could definitely find this useful within groups of college roommates or apartment mates when scheduling group clean-up days or grocery shopping.

The use of a shared calendar is being used more and more. Since my registration for the Google calendar account, I’ve noticed an increase in my use of an interactive online calendar versus my paper-based academic planner. I still use my academic planner to keep track of assignments and last-minute things-to-do. (Besides, I like to color-coordinate my tasks by importance and to cross out tasks upon completion. It makes me feel productive.) However, I found that my planner could only hold so much information in its tiny pages. My planner is the perfect size for mobility, and I did not want to buy a bigger planner due to inconvenience. I found that I moved more established parts of my schedule (i.e. courses, long-term project due dates, work schedule, appointments, etc.) to Google Calendar. At first, I kept my Google Calendar private. Just last quarter, I started a shared calendar among my friends to figure out when to get together for coffee or a meal due to my hectic full-time employment recruiting schedule. Now, our group will soon experiment with a shared calendar to coordinate outings and trips. Interesting enough, I will probably be one of the coordinators of the shared calendar experiment.

I’m just thinking through all the possibilities that our shared calendar can evolve into. The initial purpose is to give a place (as Facebook lacks a shared calendar feature) to organize and coordinate group trips. For example, I can post on Google Calendar that I am going to London on January 25^th at 8 pm. I edit the details of my post by adding transportation and housing details. I can also post what I plan to do on certain days. If anyone wants to come along, all they would have to do is send me an email to coordinate. This could be helpful for people who have no idea what they want to do. As traveling by group is usually much cheaper than traveling solo, more students look to travel to the same place if other students already planned it. We could invite more people to come along on the trip. In addition, it’s useful for friends of the program participants who want to visit Paris as they could avoid visiting their friends while they are away.

As of yet, there is no way to color-coordinate on Google. It would be nice to separate all the travel groups by color to keep them organized. In addition, it could be lucrative if students had a way to directly book transportation and hotel through Google calendar. I can always add a hyperlink with my details; however, I, like most students, do not want to make the extra effort. I haven’t attempted it, but I’m sure Google uses its calendar to tailor their advertising to the posts’ content.

posted by Koh @ 12:05 AM