Transferring its mobile assets to wider platforms, Google has announced its further expansion into travel with a new desktop app for trip planning.
Found (confusingly) at google.com/travel, Google Trips brings just about all of the company’s travel planning products under one banner on multiple platforms.
“When you’re planning a trip – whether you’re on desktop or mobile– we want to help you find the information you need, fast,”Richard Holden, Google’s vice president of product management, said in a post.
“As you plan a trip, your research and reservations will be organised for you in Trips. As we continue to evolve Google Trips, we’re making this information more accessible at google.com/travel, and in Google Search and Google Maps,” Holden said.
“We’re also adding a few new features to make planning and organising your trips easier.”
These features include giving Gmail users the ability to make edits directly to trip timelines, adding to Google’s already established trip, hotel and flight reservation feature received in confirmation emails.
The company has added that this feature will further be enhanced in the coming weeks by allowing users to manually add new reservations to trip timelines: that means connections between Gmail, Google Calendar and Travel.
A few other small yet significant features added to Travel are the inclusion weather forecasts to trip planning; personalised trip research (based on Google Account search history) and saved searches synchronised with Google accounts; and labelling of popular neighbourhoods in Google Maps.
In the coming months, Google has said that trips, including reservations for hotels and restaurants, will also be available in the Google Maps app.
Last year, Google enhanced the symmetry between its Hotels and Flights products for smartphones with the incorporation of Trends and Maps. Since then, the tech-giant has steadily rolled out a stream of developments and updates heralding the company’s undeniable interest in the travel sector.
It’s a journey that has long been in the works since the revelation of using the power of Maps to unlock Google’s full-suite of products, including Google Hotel Search – revealed two months ago – and its expansion into vacation rentals through third-party providers.
The development of its products, plural, their expansion to desktop and the transfer of its assets into one product, singular, heralds the company’s move toward a unification of its trip planning software.
