Related link: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/7133

The other day I posted a plea for iCal access to my travel reservations. A little research shows that some major hotel chains, at least, have started down this road already.

I made my reservation at the Doubletree Hotel for the O’Reilly Open Source Conference online, and discovered this link on the reservation confirmation page:

Clicking on it, I got a VCalendar file which I was then able to import into Evolution.

Inspired by this success, I looked over at the Marriott website and found that my upcoming reservations displayed this link:

This one works fine in Evolution too. Interestingly, either Marriott is using Outlook to generate these calendars or they created their VCalendar format by copying one exported from Outlook:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//Microsoft Corporation//Outlook 10.0 MIMEDIR//EN
VERSION:1.0
BEGIN:VEVENT
...

This is a great start. But I still have to manually import the file and manage any changes, and I’m still waiting for similar functionality from my airline.

Do any other hotel chains or airlines provide standards-based calendars?