Tag: Travel Apps

Google has rolled out some cloud-side updates to their site, Google Flights.  The updates bring some clearer information about the new Basic Economy fare from United, American and Delta, as well as providing flight delay predictions based on historical data.

Basic Economy is something new for United, American, and Delta.  It is a very stripped down fare where everything is an extra charge, including bringing carry-on luggage with some of the carriers.  While great for those on a budget, these extra fees can rack up quickly if you aren’t careful.  Flights now gives you information on what is restricted when you are looking up potential flights on Basic Economy.  This is to help you avoid excess fees and to make an informed purchase.

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.

If you are a member of Hilton HHonors and use their Android app, there is a nice update coming your way.  The latest build of the app, version 2.9.3 for those keeping score, brings a handful of improvements but likely the one that will get everyone’s attention is the improvements around Fingerprint Authentication.  For a while now the HHonors app has had fingerprint support but it was pretty much a one-and-done thing.  Once you signed in, it kept you signed in and you never really had to authenticate again.  Not very secure.

This update changes that.  Now you can enable the feature and you can enable a secondary feature to indicate how often you want to be required to authenticate.  You can choose to have it ask every time you fire up the app on your phone or after you have closed the app for 1 minute, 5 minutes or 10 minutes.

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.