Screengrab: Google Destinations, Image Credit: Google Blog
While there are a huge number of apps and websites that will help you plan a vacation, choosing which one to use is overwhelming. Deciding on flights, hotels, and food seems a tedious process. Fortunately, the always-helpful Google has unveiled Destinations on Google, an update to their search tools that should make your vacation planning easier. The new platform allows you to look up destinations, any location, such as a continent or country, view suggested itineraries along with flight and hotels prices, right from its search engine on a mobile phone. It also attaches videos, snapshots of local tourist sights and other locations nearby with the itineraries. According to Google, its search engine saw a fifty percent surge in travel-related questions on mobile devices last year reflecting our increasing addiction to the devices. Essentially, the mobile product helps you plan your vacation without a travel agent. It makes it really easy to find the best prices without having to spend hours sorting through information from various sites.
Google is trying to make planning a trip or vacations of a hassle. The search behemoth introduced a new feature today called Destinations on Google that lets you search for destinations, view suggested itineraries, complete with the price of flight and hotel right from its search engine.
Destinations on Google isn’t a specific app or a website. It can be accessed through a Google search browser or on the Google Mobile app for travel deals and advice. In case you are looking to vacation in Europe, you’ll be presented with a network major cities, the cost to get there and the best time to go.
The Destination page has two tabs with a combination of editorially created and algorithmically generated guides. One will help explore the specific location with pictures, description, and videos. The second includes itineraries, that’s when you intend to visit a new place and not really sure what to do there, so Google is trying to offer you some ideas.
The curated itineraries will be programmed into 201 cities virtually explore a location. A country’s Destination page will provide several itineraries based on where Google Maps has identified people traveling and the duration it sees them staying there for.
So, when it comes to booking, Google Destinations will send you to airline websites to complete the purchase, but also offers suggestions before that step. It essentially the cost of a flight and hotel, but also allows users to switch their travel dates to help show the cheapest dates to travel or the cost at a particular time of the year. Additionally, there is also an explore tab that offers a snapshot of the weather at each destination, most crucial factor while planning a trip.
However, Destinations on Google only works on mobile devices. While most of us are used to searching vacations and booking flights on the desktop, Google has designed this exclusively for mobile and will not show up on a desktop.
We don’t know whether this will change in the future, but as the search giant says it wanted to bring this out as a mobile product. Google has seen a huge spike in travel searches, also most of the Google flight searches happen on mobile, followed by destination information searches. But, beyond convenience, the company wanted to offer discovery, too. Those figures are only increasing, which illustrates why Google has launched this mobile product.
