Googles New App Wants to Be Your Personal Travel Guide
If you frequent Google Maps and use Gmail as your primary email provider, Google probably knows a lot about your travel plans. Now, the search giant is leveraging that knowledge and packaging it into a new travel app called Google Trips, which the company introduced on Monday. The free app, now available on iOS and Android, gathers travel reservations from your Gmail account and organizes them into their own individual trips. Tapping on a trip will bring you to a screen that lets you browse nearby attractions, food and drink suggestions, your current reservations, and saved places. For example, since I booked a hotel room for one night in Syracuse to attend a wedding next month, Google Trips put together a Syracuse package that includes popular sights, restaurant suggestions, and a quick link to my hotel reservation. It makes finding things like hotel addresses and confirmation numbers much quicker than digging through old emails. The app goes a step beyond just offering recommendations by also creating full day itineraries for the top 200 cities in the world. These can be accessed by tapping the Day Plan tile on the city's page. Each Day Plan includes a list of sights complete with hours of operation and the estimated travel time between each location. You can also download individual packets for different cities to your phone so that they can be used offline. Google's new app is in some ways similar to Concur's TripIt, which houses flight information, hotel reservations, and other travel-related plans in a single app. It doesn't offer real-time flight alerts or help you book a new airline ticket should your flight get delayed or cancelled like the Pro version of TripIt does. Instead, Google Trips excels at cutting down on the amount of time it takes to plan out activities and transportation options while traveling.