If, like yours truly, love the convenience of having every little detail about an upcoming trip in one place then over the last about 2 years, Google Trips has been something you’ve found indispensable.
The app, which Google released back in September 2016, acts as a point of convergence for one’s upcoming trip’s details: the key information such as flight and hotel reservations (if any) as well some add-ons. Like the weather at your destination, best places to go, currency conversions etc. Heck, it will even put together an itinerary you can just opt to follow.
And what do you need to do in order to access all that? Almost nothing. Yeah, that. You just need to make sure that the Google account you are using for Trips is where your trip details – flight bookings, hotel reservations etc – get sent to. If that is not the case then you need to forward any such information to the Gmail address associated with the Google Trips app on your mobile device. Or, you can just manually add flight booking code. Then Google does its thing.
Even better, the Trips app comes in handy when one is planning a trip. Say a business trip, a vacation or something along those lines. It’s amazing.
For the entire time I have been using Google Trips, which is to say, since day 1, I have enjoyed every bit of it and only wished it got better.
Get better it has but with a twist.
Google is has brought the Trips experience to the web recently (google.com/travel) and with that, owing to what are suspected to be low usage numbers, it has come out that the company is planning to shut down the mobile apps.
A teardown of the latest version of the app by the ever-useful folks over at Android Police revealed a hidden message bidding users goodbye. At that time, however, it wasn’t clear when the app’s shuttering will happen.
Google has since confirmed that the Google Trips app will be shutting down on August 5th. Since Google has been introducing a lot of the app’s features to existing popular Google apps and services like Search and Maps, users of Trips should be able to get much of the same functionality on those 2 applications/services alongside the web-based Google Travel offering.
Google Travel brings together Trips, Google Hotels and Google Flights.
Now, accessing Google Travel on a web browser won’t provide the same experience as what we have gotten used to on a native app but it is what users will have to make do with at the moment.
As for the features built into Search and Maps, users, especially those of us who are not in the United States and the other regions where Google avails most of the features, will likely encounter roadblocks. This is especially true for querying things like flights since Google’s flights’ service isn’t available to users in Kenya (though you can get it if you use a VPN app) which will send people to other travel services like Expedia, Kayak and the rest.
