Google have made tentative steps into the world of travel with the launch of Google City Tours. The site generates suggested itineraries for thousands of destinations around the world, and allows users to customise their schedules according to how many days they are visiting, and what they want to see.
The project is fresh off the production line at Google Labs, the internet giant's experimentation wing, where products "that aren't quite ready for prime time" are showcased.
Accordingly, there are plenty of tweaks to be made. The majority of big cities yield a good selection of well-known sights when entered into the search box, and the system is good at adding relatively obscure ports of call when requested, but it will need to work on its timing. When we tried to add Sankeys Soap to a suggested Manchester itinerary, it recommended that we visit first thing on a Friday morning. Sankeys Soap is a nightclub.
Furthermore, when the system is challenged with trickier destinations, it will often dramatically redirect visitors. When we asked City Tours for an itinerary for Blackburn, it suggested that we visit the Museum of The Queen's Lancashire Regiment, before promptly heading off to nearby Preston.
It also currently doesn't allow you to send links of customised itineraries to your friends, so you'll just have to trust us on the above.
But for established sights in established cities, the system shows a huge amount of potential. In a post yesterday Jason Kincaid of TechCrunch praised the ability of City Tours to make your holiday more efficient:
"Perhaps the coolest part of the new product is the way it uses Google Maps to figure out which locations are closest to each other. Rather than simply present a list of places Google thinks you might want to check out, the site will logically order them according to where they're located, minimising the travel time between each."
Cool indeed. Matt McGee of searchengineland looks a little further into the distance;
"Imagine Google pulling in the public transit information that it already has for many cities. Imagine it pulling in event listings like concerts and sports. Imagine local businesses being able to write their own suggested city tours that include a stop at the business's own location, and being able to embed those tour maps on their web sites. This seems like an interesting experiment to watch."
It certainly does. While Google might not have cracked it at the first attempt, their foray into a new market – travel – is an interesting, if inevitable, step. Although it might not go down too well in Blackburn.
