As Liann and I started to travel more frequently, I found that I had a difficult time keeping track of all of our trips and associated reservations. In planning a trip, it helps to organize and group together all relevant travel details, accommodations, and activities. I had always wanted a tool to manage a trip for me and provide an easy way to structure my “To Dos”. After trying a few services over the years, I have finally found a winner and I love it.
Say hello to Google Trips!
Google Trips
Google Trips is a free mobile app (available on both Android and iOS) that makes planning and traveling incredibly easy and seamless. This app has a lot of functionality packed into it and serves as both a travel planner and a travel guide.
Travel Planner
As a travel planner, Google Trips will monitor your Google account and start grouping together any travel-related emails. The benefit to Google Trips monitoring your email is that there are a variety of websites and companies you can book your travel plans through. Google does a great job at recognizing and capturing these types of emails. Once it recognizes a “travel” email, it will either add it to an existing trip or create a new trip if one doesn’t exist.
For Liann and me, a new trip is usually created whenever we purchase plane tickets or hotel accommodations since this is one of the first things we book for a trip. After that, anything we reserve for the trip is seamlessly added to one convenient location: Google Trips
Don’t have any plans yet? You can also search for places you would like to visit and create a trip from scratch to jump-start your planning.
Travel Guide
I have no problem admitting that I am not the best at researching things to do in a new city. Liann takes the cake on this, no doubt about that. I could spend an entire night researching a new city for an upcoming trip and will find mediocre things to do and see, at best. Liann comes along and finds these amazing things, things I never found, all within minutes.
Google Trips has allowed me to step up my game by offering immediate information about the location I am traveling to. It breaks the area up into 4 categories:
- Things to do – View a list or map of things to do in the area you are visiting and add them to your trip. Google can cognitively offer you suggestions of things to do based on things you have done on previous trips.
- Food & Drink – Allows you to browse restaurants and bars in the area plugging into Google Maps to see photos, reviews, and information about the business.
- Day Plans – Feeling lazy or stuck on what to do? Google Trips can suggest a full day of things to do while on your trip. It also allows you to custom build your own Day Plans so you can fully plan out your days in advance. How is that for pre-planning?!
- Discounts – Google partners with businesses to offer discounts for your upcoming trip. See if anything catches your eye!
What to Love About Google Trips?
- It systematically keeps track of your trips and plans. No more having to search through a pile of emails or papers to find what you are looking for.
- It flawlessly integrates with other google apps like Google Maps, Google Calendars, Google Photos and more. I refer to these as “Power-Ups”.
- A central location for all trip reservations and saved places.
- All Trips can be stored offline! Going somewhere with spotty cell phone coverage? No worries. Download all trip information and the offline travel guide before traveling just in case you are short on signal.
Things to Know
- Google Trips does require a Google Account.
- Google Trips only monitors the Google email, so make sure all of your travel-related emails are sent or forwarded to that email.
- When using offered discounts, your trip information is shared with the partner company. If you don’t like your information being shared with the partner company, then just ignore this feature.
Final Thoughts
As I mentioned before, I had tried some other travel management tools in the past, including TripIt and Travefy, but really disliked both of them. Each of these apps were far too much of a manual process to plan the trip and didn’t satisfy the travel guide need. Google Trips shines in both areas and is perfect for me since I have a Google Account and Android phone. That being said, it may not be for everyone but it is worth a shot if you are unhappy with the alternatives.
Google Trips was used to plan our entire trip to Colorado. Catch up on our adventure…
Have you used Google Trips in the past? If so, share your experience below. Also, let us know if you have any questions on how to use it. We will do our best to answer!
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