Category: Google Trips

Google Trips, the travel planning app that lets you have all your travel information in one place, as a handy update that is rolling out today.  The update is version 1.6 for those keeping score at home.  Aside from the normal smattering of bug fixes and performance improvements, there is now video content from YouTube and Blogger content when you visit a particular thing to do in a location.

To get to this new content, select an upcoming trip you already have in Google Trips or search for a new city, say New York City.  Once you are on the city page, tap on the blue “Things to do” block which will bring up various sites and places to go while you are in New York.  When you tap on one of those places, you will now see videos from YouTube and Blogger content in the new “from around the web” section.

Google Trips has seen its second update this week, bringing two new features that users will appreciate.  First, you now have the ability to manually add hotel and airline reservations to a trip.  Previously, there was no way to do this and the only way to get reservations into a trip was by having it automatically added via Gmail.  Now when you go into a trip within the app, you will see a FAB (Floating Action Button) which will now let you add flight and hotel information.

The other big change in this update is that Google Trips will now watch your Gmail for bus and train travel and add those automatically to your trips.  This expands the apps ability in searching Gmail as previously only hotel and airline information was automatically added.

There are a lot of travel apps in the Play Store but the newest one, Google Trips, is mighty impressive.  The app launched earlier this week and aims to be the one app you go to for information about your trip and to help you plan it.  Best of all (besides being free) is that it can work completely offline, saving you data usage while you are traveling internationally.  The leverages travel reservations received in Gmail to determine where you are going on a trip and stores that information in the Reservations section of the app.  There you can see your car, hotel and air travel all in one place.  There are other sections too such as Things to Do.  This gives you recommendations on things around where you will be traveling that you can do to get to explore the city you are visiting.  Once you find something you like, tap the star icon for that things and it will be added to your Saved places so you can keep track of them and plan them into your trip.