https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2016/09/see-more-plan-less-try-google-trips.html
On your next vacation somewhere, Google wants you to enjoy it with a new companion — Trips. It’s a new travel app that helps you plan your trip and every excursion. This app will manage your trip from the beginning to the end.
What makes it more interesting is that it’s free to use. It uses content from your Google account. Based on the travel information, like car reservations, hotel receipts, and flight confirmation, among others, in your Gmail inbox, it can create trips automatically.
Apart from that, it gives you real-time updates on flight delays and gate changes so you’ll never miss a thing. What’s more is that you can download all those details so you can access it while you’re traveling and no Internet. However, if you’re offline, you’ll never get those real-time updates.
Unlike other travel apps, Trips offers other incredible features for every trip. When you open it, you’ll see a list of your upcoming, past and current trips. Tap on a journey and you’ll find additional options and information that’s beyond your standard reservations.
In a blog post, Google described Trips as:
“Google Trips is a personalized tour guide in your pocket. Each trip contains key categories of information, including day plans, reservations, things to do, food & drink, and more, so you have everything you need at your fingertips. The entire app is available offline — simply tap the “Download” button under each trip to save it to your phone.”
It’s an additional entry of Google to the travel market. It’ll compete with TripAdvisor, Yelp, and other travel apps. In the past, TripAdvisor’s CEO said that Google posed a serious threat to this market.
Besides Google, another competitor that’ll be entering the scene is Airbnb Inc.
But Google’s Trips will give you another reason to use its Gmail and Maps apps. These apps are used by Trips for some travel data, instead of using similar services from rivals.
After the announcement, TripAdvisor’s shares dropped as much as 2.4 percent in New York. On the other hand, shares of Alphabet Inc, Google’s parent company, have little changed.
For those who aren’t following Google’s trip-planning journey, its Inbox already collects users’ flight and hotel reservations. The app also organizes them by a trip.
Then, in 2011, it bought Zagat, which is a restaurant review firm. Last year, it acquired Frommer, a travel guide publisher.
With Trips, you don’t need to toggle between Gmail, Maps and other apps where you saved your restaurant recommendations. This new app from Google will help you do that all in one place.
However, no matter how useful Trips is, you still can’t perform booking activities within the app. This type of transaction remains in the realm of Expedia Inc and Priceline Group Inc.
Despite that, this app lets you personalize your trip with all of your information taken from your Gmail and you can access everything in a single place. You can keep track of the changes in your reservations and plan an entire trip within the app.
