Digital Travel Guide: Google Simplifies Trip Planning

The team at Google Labs set out on a mission to simplify online trip planning 6 months ago.  They had a vision of making travel planning as simple as opening a browser and entering the name of one’s favorite city.  Google already possessed data on the top sights in many cities around the world, as well as directions within those cities (via Google Maps). Combining the two resources was a natural transition. They’ve since launched City Tours in demo form, optimizing it to take into account feedback from users across the globe.  On Monday, Google Labs announced the following additions to the demo – and reassured users that the demo will continue to evolve and improve beyond its current, already informative stage.

Show complete walking directions. Until now, Google simply estimated the travel time between destinations based on the distance between them. Today, they start providing complete pedestrian routing information, taking road types, bridges and bodies of water into account just like a regular Google Maps walking directions search.

Import a My Map as a tour.   City Tours now allows users to import My Maps of things they wanted to see on previous trips; Google will try to schedule a visit to every feature in a user’s map, just as if they had entered the city name into City Tours’ search box.  Alternatively, public My Maps can be imported into City Tours and customized by user preferences, for the dates on which they’re visiting.  For example, this walking tour of New York bookshops is available as a public My Map.

Finally, Google made several smaller user interface improvements both to help usability and make City Tours behave more like the Google Maps site users are familiar with.

[via Google Lat Long Blog]