Google’s new Destinations feature lets you plan trips right from its search engine on mobile

Google is making it easier than ever to plan a trip or vacation with a new feature that lets you look up destinations, complete with flight and hotels prices, right from its search engine on a mobile phone.

“Google Destinations” is triggered by certain searches — such as “Spain surfing,” “New Zealand hiking,” or “Colorado skiing” — and can also be found when a user searches for a specific country, state, city or other destination.

The service is only available on mobile — Google explained that saying it saw a 50 percent spike in travel-related questions on mobile devices last year — but, beyond convenience, is intended to offer discovery, too. Destinations includes activity suggestions, in the form of curated itineraries, for an initial 201 cities worldwide. So, if you want to visit a new place but aren’t 100 percent what to do there, Google hopes to give you some ideas and convince you to book that ticket.

On the subject of bookings themselves, Google Destinations sends users to airline websites to complete their purchase, but it does offer some nifty features before that step. In addition to estimating the cost of a flight and hotel, it allows users to switch their travel dates to help show when prices are at their lowest, or the cost at a particular time of the year. There’s also an ‘Explore’ tab to give you a snapshot of the weather at each destination, an important factor when planning a trip.

Google Destinations is initially available in the U.S. and a handful of other countries. From our time using it, we found it to be quick and useful. It remains to be seen if people will pay for large ticket items spontaneously via their phone, but Google created Street View — the fantasy globe trotting service that can suck up your time like nobody’s business — and now acting on your travel urges just got a lot easier. If nothing else, Destinations is a better way to fill five minutes of downtime on the bus than Candy Crush.

Comments

The EHang 184 Is A Human-Sized Drone Taking Off At CES

We’ve seen some pretty cool stuff on day 1 of CES 2016, but probably nothing more eye-catching than the EHang 184, a human-sized drone built by the Chinese UAV company EHang . Yes you heard right — a giant autonomous drone that fits a human. It’s basically what you would expect to see if someone shrunk you down to the size of a LEGO and stuck you next to a DJI Inspire. Except no one was shrunk, and the giant flying machine was sitting smack in the middle of the CES drone section. EHang, which was founded in 2014 and has raised about $50M in venture fundingto date, was pretty gung-ho about telling everyone at CES that the 184 was the future of personal transport. And for the most part, people were too in awe to question them. But the reality is that the company probably was using the 184 as more of a marketing tool for their standard-sized drones like the Ghost . Not that we’re saying that the 184 will never be a real thing, just that it probably isn’t co...

Western Union Brings Money Transfer And Its Tricky Fees To Chat Apps

Remittance has always been a shady business. Migrant workers need to send money they earn home to their families, but get hit with fine print fees so less cash comes out the other side than they might assume. Remittance companies earn extra by keeping the margin between their own made up exchange rate and the real one. Western Union is the best known remittance company, with 500,000 brick-and-mortar locations around the world. But tech startups like TransferWise, Azimo, and WorldRemit are gunning for the business. They hope to increase convenience and reduce fees to lure customers away from Western Union, Moneygram, and other old-school remittance providers. So Western Union is going digital thanks to partnerships with big messaging apps. It launched its Western Union Connect system in October last year, followed by a partnership with WeChat for sending up to $100. Now it’s getting into bed with Viber , which has over 664 million “unique” users, thou...

Google Calls Out EFF Over Bogus Claims That It Snoops On Students With Its Chromebooks

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) caused quite a stir this week when it alleged that Google is using its Chromebook platform, which has made a significant impact in the education sector, to snoop on students. The charges were damning, with the EFF claiming that Google was violating its own corporate policies and using students’ personally identifiable browsing data/habits to refine its services, in addition to sharing that data with partners. "EFF bases this petition on evidence that Google is engaged in collecting, maintaining, using, and sharing student personal information in violation of the 'K-12 School Service Provider Pledge to Safeguard Student Privacy' (Student Privacy Pledge), of which it is a signatory,” alleged the EFF in its initial FTC complaint. Google takes such allegations very seriously, and has thus responded to every claim brought forth by the EFF. “While we appreciate the EFF’s focus on student data privacy, we are confid...

Following Patent Deal, Every Time Apple Sells An iPhone, Ericsson Gets A Bit Of Money

Telecommunications infrastructure company Ericsson just announced that it has reached an agreement with Apple over an ongoing patent dispute. For the next seven years, Apple will pay a fraction of its iPhone and iPad profit to Ericsson in royalties. Back in February, Ericsson filed suits in many different jurisdictions for patent infringement (the International Trade Commission, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, as well as courts in the U.K., Germany and the Netherlands). According to the Swedish company, Apple has been violating 41 patents over the past few years with its iPhone and iPad, in particular patents related to GSM, UMTS and LTE technologies. As expected, the two companies have reached an agreement and Ericsson is dropping all of its lawsuits. Today’s news isn’t particularly surprising as Ericsson holds more than 35,000 patents. Many of them are related to wireles...

Android Oreo vs iOS 11: What’s different and what’s the same?

Google just announced Android Oreo and it packs a handful of new features. Some are at the system level and speed up the system and extend the battery life, while others are features that will change the way users interact with their phone. A lot of these features should be familiar to iPhone and iPad owners. Normally Apple is the one accused of copying Android, but for Android Oreo, Google lifted a handful of features straight from iOS, while a couple of new functions are hitting Android before iOS. Notifications Google cribbed iOS for Android’s new notification scheme. In An...

Exciting Technology

Search This Blog