Trans-Pacific Calendar Blues

We have clearly got carried away with AI. I'm hearing singularity, AGI, fully automated economy... Yet the truth is the basic IT services and apps just suck. They are often pretty and that seems to be sufficient for most complacent users, yet the quality of their output is really, really bad.

A year ago I was complaining about the Flighty app. Pretty but totally inaccurate.

Google Calendar is not that much better - it fails on some most critical tasks. Like managing date / time on trans - Pacific flights. These flights are tricky because they cross the date line: going west you lose a day, going east you gain a day.

My typical east-bound itineraries are via Los Angeles or San Francisco, where I have other connecting flights. These flights are always part of the same booking and they usually include a 1-3 hours layover. Looking at the departing times of the connecting flights, they often depart on the same day as the long haul Asia -> America flight, but nominally at an earlier time. For example Seoul - San Francisco - Denver: departed Seoul 5:20pm, arrived in San Francisco 12:20pm (on the same day), and the connecting flight departed San Francisco 2:20pm to land in Denver 6:20pm. So nominally the connecting flight departed 3 hours earlier than the original flight, both on the same day.

These calculations are easy for frequent flyers, but most casual travelers get completely lost. And many of them try relying on a calendar app. Google Calendar automatically scans the associated email account for travel bookings and automatically generates calendar entries.

The problem is, it does it all wrong, as it puts the connecting flight on the following day. By that time your booked flight would be long gone.

I have reported this bug to Google multiple times (every time I travel from Asia or Australia to America). And nobody seems to care. The bug is still there. And if someone wants to rely on the calendar, they will simply be screwed up, missing their connecting flights.

I understand managing time zones may be difficult for humans. But it is a very precisely defined problem, with very precise arithmetic formulas that leave no room for interpretation. It is, after all, just basic additions and subtractions. Yet it seems the leading app from the leading company just can't do it right.