Over the past years, Google has been aiming to become the one-stop destination for everything. It debuted the Google Trips app, both on Android and iOS past year, to help you keep track of your itinerary during travel. The search giant has today announced a massive update to this app, adding several new and updated features to ease your traveling experience.
Since Google Trips is directly connected to Gmail through your account, it brings along the capability to automatically populate your itinerary with your upcoming travel plans. It imports the aviation and hotel reservations, clubbing them under appropriate sections within the app. This update expands on the travel info collected by also looking for and adding bus, as well as train reservations to the itinerary. It will be displayed under the reservations section, thus providing travelers access to every mode of transport they are using to commute.
While this is the most significant feature of Google Trips and helps you easily keep track of your plans without batting an eye but there could be occasions where you want to include additional info or make changes to the current schedule. The updated app now enables you to perform these actions using the usual material ‘+’ sign at the bottom right. You can press the same to include your flight, hotel, car, notes, and restaurant reservations to the list — where Google will help you out by auto-completing the info.
Talking about the same, the blog post reads,
For those last-minute or spontaneous changes, we built in a feature that lets you quickly update and add new details for flight, hotel, car, and restaurant reservations, even when you don’t have an email confirmation.
Further, you’re no longer required to sift through your inbox to forward you each and every reservation to a third person. Travelers using Google Trips now have the infamous options – provided by its rivals for a long time – of sharing the itinerary with your friends and family at just the click of a button. Open any on your reservations and tap on the ‘arrow’ button on the top right to share via an email your travel itinerary with others.
Finally, there is always a possibility that you may not find the best internet connectivity at the location you’re hitch-hiking to. Thus, Google Trips already includes one of the best features that allow you to download your itineraries for offline access. This means you can keep all of your booking info closer to yourself despite the condition of wireless network available to you. Google has also shared figures which suggest that the offline feature is already quite popular among Trips users.
On average, nearly a quarter of Trips users are offline for more than seven hours at a time while traveling, and nearly 70 percent use the offline feature and download trips in advance.
This update makes the Google Trips application more competitive against rivals such as TripIt. The search giant already has access to their treasure trove of data collected through its arsenal of services, such as Google Maps and others. It can leverage this data to show recommendations and suggestions based on the travelers interests. The update is steadily rolling out to Google Trips users worldwide and should be available for your Android or iOS device soon.
