Travel Industry

With the launch of City Tours (http://citytours.googlelabs.com/), Google adds to the list of trip-planning solutions which use some combination of local data, maps, user generated content and social networking tools.

Google City Tours

City Tours is still under Google Labs , and as such, it’s still pretty much in it’s infancy, but it’s already being touted as something with immense possibilities. City Tours points out the attractions and plans out multi-day trips. All you do is name the city and you’re good to go. And if you specify the location of your hotel and the length of your trip, City Tours will map out a complete itinerary for you.

When you type in the city name, you get back a planned 3-day trip, with around 10-12 attractions mapped out per day. The site suggests time to be spent at each location, and walking distances between the mapped attractions. You can modify the number of days, and add new attractions.

It’s pretty basic and simple, and adding new attractions seems to work, so long as you don’t try to add some name or attraction which could have other meanings. But the interesting part is in the possibilities that City Tours offers. It uses Google Maps to figure out the relative positions of the attractions in each itinerary, and line them up so as to create a suggested tour with the minimum overall amount of walking necessary.

So you could, for example, work out a complete trip plan, starting from your hotel, throw in restaurants, attractions, shows, and a complete trip, rather than just the attractions. You could make it work for a multi-day roadtrip across state lines, involving multiple destinations.

And instead of just walking between destinations, if you could plug-in Google Transit to cover the distances between the attractions, that would make it even more closer to reality. You’d get a trip plan with suggested attractions for each day of your stay, and the closest public transport options for traveling from one point to the next. That’s pretty much all you’re looking for in a trip planner.

And there are plenty of sites, like GoPlanit, which already offer something close to this. The difference with Google is the vast scale of it and the user participation - pretty soon, people will have added so many attractions to each place that the system will be bigger and better than what any other trip planning site can offer.