Google
wants to make it easy for travelers to decide where and when to go on
vacation, and to see at a glance what a trip is likely to cost, right
from their mobile phones.
The
company on Tuesday announced a search feature, Destinations on Google,
that touches on almost every aspect of a vacation, from research to
flight selection, hotel booking and itinerary planning. Destinations
does not offer off-the-beaten-path guides or exclusive information that
can’t be found elsewhere on the web. Rather, it’s meant to make
researching and planning a trip on a mobile phone (typically a clumsy
experience) more intuitive and productive for the occasional traveler by
delivering good-quality basic information.
This
is the first time Google has introduced a travel tool on mobile (where
people are increasingly spending their time) before desktop; it’s
available through your mobile browser or the Google app on iOS and Android.
Everything on Destinations begins with a single search screen; there’s
no drilling down through multiple websites and hopping among them, no
entering your desired number of nights or travel companions again and
again. Here’s how it works.
Where to Go
On
your smartphone, open your browser or the Google app and search for,
say, “Europe vacation.” A grid of multiple destination tiles will appear
— Paris, London, Rome, Barcelona, Madrid, Prague, Amsterdam, to name a
few — each with an appealing photo. These are the most popular European
destinations according to Google. Each photo has a bit of information
beneath it, including the cheapest week to go within the next six months
(based on your origin and the destination), the cost of the cheapest
flight for that week, as well as the average price of a hotel
(three-star or the next available class).
It’s
Europe at-a-glance, an easy-to-scroll, elegant reminder of some of
what’s out there — emphasis on “some of.” If you’re looking for less
frequented and up-and-coming places such as Sarajevo in Bosnia and
Herzegovina, you have to make your initial search more specific: Instead
of searching for “Europe vacation,” search instead for “southern Europe
vacation” and you’ll find it. Or, if you have a particular destination
in mind, like Split in Croatia, you can type “Split, Croatia vacation”
into the search box and it will turn up. In other words, you can search
at the city, state (“California destinations”), country or continent
level. If you just search for Greece, for instance, you’ll see a
carousel of “destinations” (Athens, Santorini, Rhodes) that you can
scroll through and click into for more details.
A
word of caution: When you begin a search, Google uses your current
location to determine the origin city (and therefore the price) for
flights. That’s a problem since I might be in Miami when I want to
research a trip from New York to Latin America. Google did not confirm
whether in the future users will be able to set their starting point,
but it seems a logical next step.
Narrow the Options
You
can filter those “Europe vacation” search results by travel dates,
price and interests such as architecture, beach, camping, culture, golf,
hiking, nature, sailing, skiing. Just tap the appropriate heading on
the top of the screen and adjust the filters. Your search results will
update accordingly. When I filtered Europe for skiing, for instance, my
screen was instantly repopulated with images of mountains and vacation
options for Bansko, Bulgaria; Chamonix, France; Zermatt, Switzerland;
St. Anton am Arlberg, Austria; Sierra Nevada Ski Station, Spain; and
more.
Delve Deeper
See
that lovely photo of Venice? Tap it, or the photo of any city on your
screen that captures your imagination, to learn more. Background
information about each place is culled from Wikipedia as well as from a
New York content team that also writes the descriptions for Google Maps.
On each destination page, on a tab that says Explore, you can check out
its top sights (in Amsterdam, for example, the Rijksmuseum, Anne Frank
House, Vondelpark), see popular travel months for tourists, find out
about the climate and watch related videos (more users are turning to
mobile video for travel research, Google said).
The
“top sights” are just that: the obvious must-see attractions, not
lesser-known gems or nascent activities. And sorry, foodies, you won’t
find a guide to restaurants and bars, either. Think of Destinations as
your basic Crayola crayon box; it is not aimed at those who want Magic
Mint.
Build an Itinerary
On
that same destination page that you reached by tapping a photo is a
Plan a Trip tab that allows you to select how many people are traveling,
the number of stops you’re willing to make when you fly, the number of
nights you plan to stay and your desired hotel class (up to five stars).
Once you add those details you can use an interactive price bar graph.
With a swipe right or left it slides through the months, showing you the
changing price of your trip over time.
One
of the niftiest features of Destinations is Popular Itineraries: trips
through a country in a logical order with details about how far apart
each site or activity is so you can maximize your time. But unlike most
itineraries you find in travel publications, Popular Itineraries are not
created by editors or writers. They are based on anonymous and
aggregated data across a large pool of travelers who have opted into
sharing their mobile location data with Google. It’s the same technology
Google uses to create its Popular Times
graphs; i.e. people using mobile phones in a restaurant help Google
determine the busiest and slowest times. As a result, you can see, for
example, that on a Thursday night Bar Boulud in New York is most popular
between 5:30 and 7:30 p.m. and that getting a seat at 10 p.m. would be
easier.
To
find Popular Itineraries, search for a country and add “vacation” or
“travel.” Google will then turn up a guide; to get it, click on the blue
button under the basic information for the country. When I searched for
“France vacation,” there were several Popular Itineraries in the travel
guide, including seven days in Nice, Avignon, Montpellier, Toulouse and
Bordeaux; four days in Paris, Burgundy and Lyon; and five days in
Paris, Strasbourg and Colmar.
A
different feature, Suggested Itineraries, is not currently based on
aggregate phone data; it offers sample itineraries for cities, not
entire countries, by the content team at Google.
Book Your Trip
While some Destinations features call to mind online travel agencies like Expedia and Travelocity,
Destinations is not meant to emphasize shopping for flights and hotels.
Its primary purpose, a Google product manager told me, is to help users
figure out where to go. The technology of Google Flights,
my go-to comparison tool, and hotel search are baked into Destinations.
Google Flights shows options across multiple airlines, but to book you
go to an airline’s own website. Choosing a hotel through Destinations
takes you to a Google search page with information about the hotel, its
location, reviews and the option to book through a partner site such as Hotels.com, Booking.com or Venere.com.
Bottom Line
Google
says Destinations is designed for the leisure traveler who takes a trip
or two a year and is concerned about making the right choices for that
big getaway. He or she is interested in popular places and wants to see
the major sites.
Destinations
is not for those looking for obscure art galleries, or for foodies
seeking the next great restaurant or food truck. Experienced travelers
who have a short list of where they want to go, who fly frequently, who
use particular airlines because they have elite status and who seek
off-the-beaten path itineraries won’t be surprised by the cities or
points of interest they see on Destinations.
That
said, chances are they’ll like the planning tools. The price bar graph
is a quick way to narrow down when to go. And a flexible dates feature
allows you to say that you want to go in June, for instance, and then
see your travel options for the entire month, rather than for specific
dates. Details about rainfall and temperature mean you don’t have to run
a separate search to see if you were planning to visit during hurricane
season. And Points of Interest and Suggested Itineraries could be handy
for business travelers parachuting into a place for a night or two but
hoping to get to a must-see spot between meetings.
Is
Destinations regularly unearthing hidden treasures? No. Does
Destinations make it easier to spark ideas and to start plotting?
Absolutely. You can type “Caribbean vacation” in the search box and
instantly begin finding the island that’s right for you. You can do that
on some vacation-idea apps, but most are haphazard and, more important,
divorced from useful information about flights and hotels. Destinations
on Google integrates the puzzle pieces.
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