Google Has Just Launched a Handy Offline Travel Planner, Google Trips
Add this to your travel checklist.
Until the Internet becomes a universal, ever-present thing that radiates down from the sky and lets us check Instagram anywhere in the world, we're apparently destined to be stuck with offline maps and or paying through the nose for international roaming when travelling (read: getting lost) overseas. Until that blessed day comes, Google is trying to make life easier for travelling smartphone-wielding folk with their new travel planner app, Google Trips.
Earlier this week Google unveiled the new app (which is available on iOS and Android), which is designed to help you plan your trip and help you explore your destination when you get there. It's both a planning tool and a place to store all your important travel docs in one place — and it lets you access that information when you're out and about and without access to 4G or Wi-Fi.
So what can you use it for? First off, it will pull all your important travel info like flights, bookings and reservation numbers from your Gmail inbox and organises them into a chronological 'trip'. You can save these to access offline; it's meant to help you avoid that momentary panic where you get off the plane, go to look up the information for your Airbnb and then realise you can't access your emails.
The more fun aspect of Trips though are the planning features. The Things to Do feature will give you a list of, well, things to do in the city you're in. These are pulled from what both you and other Google users have searched for in that city, and can be filtered by area of interest. The Day Plans feature gets a little more specific. The app will suggest a whole heap of things to do based on where you're staying and how much time you have — so if you only have an afternoon in a city, it will bring up the best things to do based on what's around you and what's open. You can then create a point-to-point itinerary that will show you where everything is and how to get there. You can save this offline too.
Google have called this app "magic", and while we certainly wouldn't go that far (can tech companies stop calling themselves wizards?), it is a very useful tool if you're travelling without access to internet and is a handy way to use Google Maps offline. The planning tool looks like a smoother version of Stay.com, an app we've found useful for pinning places on a map when travelling.
You can download the Google Trips app here.
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