Delve Deeper

See that lovely photo of Venice? Tap it, or the photo of any city on your screen that captures your imagination, to learn more. Background information about each place is culled from Wikipedia as well as from a New York content team that also writes the descriptions for Google Maps. On each destination page, on a tab that says Explore, you can check out its top sights (in Amsterdam, for example, the Rijksmuseum, Anne Frank House, Vondelpark), see popular travel months for tourists, find out about the climate and watch related videos (more users are turning to mobile video for travel research, Google said).

The “top sights” are just that: the obvious must-see attractions, not lesser-known gems or nascent activities. And sorry, foodies, you won’t find a guide to restaurants and bars, either. Think of Destinations as your basic Crayola crayon box; it is not aimed at those who want Magic Mint.

Build an Itinerary

On that same destination page that you reached by tapping a photo is a Plan a Trip tab that allows you to select how many people are traveling, the number of stops you’re willing to make when you fly, the number of nights you plan to stay and your desired hotel class (up to five stars). Once you add those details you can use an interactive price bar graph. With a swipe right or left it slides through the months, showing you the changing price of your trip over time.

One of the niftiest features of Destinations is Popular Itineraries: trips through a country in a logical order with details about how far apart each site or activity is so you can maximize your time. But unlike most itineraries you find in travel publications, Popular Itineraries are not created by editors or writers. They are based on anonymous and aggregated data across a large pool of travelers who have opted into sharing their mobile location data with Google. It’s the same technology Google uses to create its Popular Times graphs; i.e. people using mobile phones in a restaurant help Google determine the busiest and slowest times. As a result, you can see, for example, that on a Thursday night Bar Boulud in New York is most popular between 5:30 and 7:30 p.m. and that getting a seat at 10 p.m. would be easier.

To find Popular Itineraries, search for a country and add “vacation” or “travel.” Google will then turn up a guide; to get it, click on the blue button under the basic information for the country. When I searched for “France vacation,” there were several Popular Itineraries in the travel guide, including seven days in Nice, Avignon, Montpellier, Toulouse and Bordeaux; four days in Paris, Burgundy and Lyon; and five days in Paris, Strasbourg and Colmar.

A different feature, Suggested Itineraries, is not currently based on aggregate phone data; it offers sample itineraries for cities, not entire countries, by the content team at Google.