During Google’s Marketing Live event on May 14, VP of engineering, shopping and travel at Google, Oliver Heckmann, announced the latest efforts to consolidate and simplify travel planning. This effort is known as Trips and is available on mobile and desktop platforms. Trips lets users explore sights and attractions as well as shop for flights, hotels and packages.
If you want to check out Trips, head over to https://www.google.com/travel. On this page, you’ll find these tabs:
- Trips
- Explore
- Flights
- Hotels
- Packages
If you have some travel booked, the “Trips” tab displays an automatically generated timeline base on confirmation emails from your Gmail inbox. You’ll see a timeline that features a weather forecast, reservations, flights and accommodations and gaps in the timeline. These are presented with with suggestions, such as locations from the user’s map or search history. In a couple of weeks, users will be able to edit their trip timeline and manually add reservations. If you aren’t logged in or don’t have any trips booked, the tab will display recommendations for potential trips and popular destinations.
The Explore tab presents photographs, articles, videos and other information about a location, including “Things to do,” “Suggested day plans,” and “When to visit.”
The “Flights,” “Hotels,” and “Packages” tabs let users compare prices but all transactions are still handled through other parties.