I love Booking.com. It’s my favorite travel reservation site.

I often book way more reservations than I’ll ever use. Sometimes I’m not sure I’ll actually be able to travel. Other times I’m not sure where the weather will be best. I love optionality.

But it’s hard to keep track of all the reservations I make. Specifically, when I can still cancel without a fee. Booking heavily markets “free cancellation” as a feature, but doesn’t want to incentivize cancellations.

I searched around for apps that might scan your gmail or connect to Booking.com and notify you. But I couldn’t find anything. This is just like when I struggled to get notified if my solar power system was down. So I built a tiny app that solves this problem.

I used Google Scripts, which is just like JavaScript. It has a bunch of features that work directly with gmail and Google Calendar. Two apps that I use all the time. So long as I could scan my email for incoming Booking.com reservations and then create a notification in my calendar, I’d be set.

This was pretty simple once I figured out the object model. Fewer than 100 lines of code and I’m all set. I put the project up on GitHub if anyone wants to use it or improve it.

The next step would be to create a hosted app, but it’s easy enough to set up on your own. See the README.