Google Trips: A Product Review
Google Trips is one of the very few apps by Google that not a lot many people have heard about. The app was launched two years back, but it has stayed under the radar for the most part; I haven’t seen it on any of my close friends’ phones yet.
For people who don’t know what Google Trips is: it’s a trip planning app that you can use to plan and organize your trip. Travel is a massive industry, and, therefore, there is umpteen number of solutions that can help you with different parts of your trip planning — airline/hotel/car reservations, places to visit, foods to try. You will find hundreds of apps/digital products catering to each of these areas.
However, several features in Google Trips stand out in comparison with any other trip planning apps.
Reservations/Booking Management
Google Trips syncs up with your Gmail account. On connecting your Gmail account with the app, it automatically picks up all the reservations/booking emails ever since you created the Gmail account and neatly organizes them under different trips you’ve taken in the past or are planning to make in future.
All your airline tickets, hotel reservations, taxi bookings, restaurant reservations are accessible from within the trip under the Reservation section. You don’t have to scramble and search your email account every time you need to check your reservations — quite a useful feature.
Day Plans
I’d never seen anything like this before — or even close — in any other app. In Day Plans, there are a few suggested full and half day plans created automatically. Plans are theme based with each having a list of sight-seeing locations to visit. It’s kind of a virtual tour guide that takes the hassle and pain a person has to go through to the plan their whole day. Only a company at the scale of Google has all the ability and data to pull this off.
If you don’t like any of the existing plans, it also gives you the ability to create your custom plans. All you have to do is zoom in on the area you’re interested in exploring and wave the magic wand within the app. It automatically creates a plan for you. There is a kind of serendipity to it which delights me.
A travel buff would probably do everything from scourging travel websites to filter the best locations to visit to create a timeline based on opening hours, how much time to spend at each place and so and so. However, that’s not how most of the people plan, and for them, I believe, Day Plans is more than good enough.
Getting Around & Need to Know
Another area where I found the app useful is the ability to access all information related to transportation or health and emergencies needs from within the app. For example, Information about to and from the airport, how to get public transport or taxi, where to call in case of emergency is all presented neatly within the app.
It’s not something unique and is easily searchable, but having all the information easily accessible in place is very comforting for the traveler.
Wishlist
There is a lot more to like about the app along with what I covered above, but what else, if present, could have made it even more delightful.
Day Plans v2.0
I love the Day Plans feature, but I wish it could do more — especially for people like me. I love eating out and want to want to make sure that I try some of the must-visit places if I’m visiting a new city/town. I wish I also could see an overlay of the restaurants I must visit or plan to eat on the day plans map.
If I’m spending a full-day in an area, I don’t want to miss out on the must-visit restaurants or my favorite restaurants in the vicinity. I don’t want to satiate my hunger by eating at “whatever is available nearby.” I want to have a completely immersive experience, even if I have to take a little detour along the way.
Google already has the right assets required to make it feasible
- It can pick up restaurants where I’ve already made reservations that from within the app
- It can also pick up restaurants that I’ve saved or favorited within the app
- It can also use lists data from Google Maps to suggest a few top places to try in the area. Right now, the app has a section for food and drinks, but I’m underwhelmed by it 1) There are only very few options listed 2) I don’t know on what basis they have selected those restaurants for me.
Foursquare is my go-to app for restaurants. Currently, I see myself switching between Foursquare and Google Trips to painfully plan my day — both the places I’ll be visiting and the restaurants I’ll be eating.
Complete Trip Planner
Outside of the main Google app, I, believe, this app has the potential to become the go-to app for your end-to-end trip planning. Right now, it only takes care of one part of a user’s trip planning journey: it’s only useful once I’ve already decided where I want to go and made all the reservations. The very start of the user’s trip planning journey from when the user is looking for inspirations to searching for places to go to finalize the location and dates to make reservations for flights, hotels, taxi is missing from the app.
Google already has some of the assets in place to make it possible: Google Flights, and Google Hotels are two meta-search engines embedded within the Google Search. But, will Google integrate these two products within Google Trips? That’s a question worthy of a separate post, and critical areas worth pondering over are:
- Google needs more customer touch points as its hegemony on the desktop didn’t translate as well as on mobile. It pays Apple and other OEMs billions of dollars to be the default search engine on mobile, which it classifies as traffic acquisition costs.
- Google has other competing products — Google Search & Google Maps — that are vying for the same consumer attention and are monetizing pretty well. Will it cannibalize those?
- Travel category is one of the biggest revenue generators for Google. Companies such as Expedia, Priceline, TripAdvisor spend billions of dollars on AdWords to acquire customers. In 2016 alone, Priceline and Expedia together spent ~$4 billion on ads on Google. How will partners or frenemies react to such a move?
- Will it create more regulatory hurdles for them when they were already fined by EU last year for giving priority placement to its products over other meta-search services and are still in the middle of more investigations?
- Will the acquisition of companies such as TripAdvisor that are trading at a much lower price than their all-time high help?
Thinking about these all questions make me very curious: If Google can’t or doesn’t extend the functionality to make it a full-fledged trip planning app, what could happen to it in the long-run? Will Google sunset it and use the data collected so far to make the other products (i.e., Google Maps) more useful? After all, two years have passed since the launch, and the app hasn’t evolved much except for one noteworthy update last year. Thoughts?
Feel free to leave in comments if you’ve anything to add or any vital angle I might have missed. I’m not an expert on the travel industry and like many of you, readers, I, myself, am trying to learn through the exercise of writing :-)
Thanks Alfonso for reading the draft and suggesting the edits.
Image Credits: Google Trips iOS App
