Talk to me about using or not using time zones to track my flights in outlook.

I use Outlook on both windows pc, but also on my Android phone alongside Google Calendar.

Ive just been sent calendar invites for flight times – and they have used the timezone feature showing different time zone for take off and for landing place. Does this ‘work’ when the phone updates timezone?

Will my phone send me to the airport at the right time, or is this a confuzzlement and I should just rely on paper ticket, calendar and a watch…!?

Invitation.

Should sync when you update the time zone on your device.

I don’t know for certain, but I would have thought (/hoped) that any calendar entries are stored as UTC and then converted to display in whatever TZ is required.

That is what I *think*, but don’t want to arrive at a flight 4 hours late….

You could download tripcase, it manages flights quite well and displays in local time.

Airline apps are also good for this.

matt_outandabout – Member

That is what I *think*, but don’t want to arrive at a flight 4 hours late….

Yeah, I’m always quite wary of this. End up setting multiple alarms when on business trips to Germany, as I don’t quite trust the software to work as it should.

I missed a dentist appointment a couple of years ago, because I was away in Germany the day before & my calendar pinged up a reminder but had jumped the appointment forward an hour – so I thought, ah great – dentists tomorrow at 5, when in actual fact it was at 4pm.
The next day I got a phone call as I was leaving work to get to the appointment asking me where I was, as I was 15mins late for my 4pm appointment….checked my calendar & sure enough, it said 4pm, rather than 5.
Probably something I could have changed in the settings, but when I made the appointment in my calendar 6 months earlier I hadn’t envisaged being in Germany the day before, when the reminder popped up.

^that is my worry!

Don’t trust Outlook or Windows to update the time zone correctly.

95% it’s fine but on occasion it gets it wrong.

Just check your itinerary for the time.

Outlook / Exchange store internally in UTC, and also optionally stores a timezone for the calendar item.

It then depends on the client and/or API used. Some will auto convert from UTC to local time. I would expect official Outlook app to do it. It gets confusing though as Outlook on the desktop can show times on the calendar corrected, but times in the actual item in the timezone set along with the timezone, but then you can toggle timezones on and off. Not sure if the mobile app does this.

I’ve dabbled a fair bit in the back end of all this working with Exchange Web Services, and it’s messy.

Also with phones, make sure the time zone of the phone is getting correctly updated when you get off the plane. Mobile networks are often poor at setting time and/or time zone (even UK). Though modern phones tend to get it right via location and updating via data, but if you have data turned off it may not.