Planning a day in Barcelona.
GoogleWhile it's true that traveling has gotten much easier now that planning can be done entirely online, it can still be a headache. Looking up places to go, finding your tickets and scheduling everything appropriately requires several apps and services.
Ever eager to consolidate your experience, Google has a new app called Google Trips.
On top of being able to do Google-y things like look up popular attractions and nearby restaurants, it keeps track of all your tickets and reservations -- which you can access even when you're offline.
You can also customize a daily itinerary, laying out how to get to places and figuring out how long your route will take.
If you don't want to make one on your own, the app can generate one for you. Once it knows your location and how much time you have -- it can plan a full day's trip or something just for the morning, for example -- you can tap the magic wand icon on the bottom right corner and it will recognize popular areas nearby. From there, it will lay out a schedule that you can then tweak further.
There are several travel services that already offer this kind of planning -- check some of them out in our roundup of best travel apps -- but Trips takes advantage of Google's wide geographical database and your Gmail, which is where you can send reservations and ticket confirmations.
Speculation that this project was in the works started around April, and we got a whiff of this project back in May when it rolled out for beta testing. It's finally available today for download at the Play Store and iTunes app store.
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