After searching for a location on a mobile device, Google Destinations will aggregate a number of options including airfare, hotel prices, popular itineraries, potential forecasts, and heavy tourist dates.
It brings up results based on the most visited itineraries, and based on historic visits by other travellers.
For example, if you’ve been dying to go on that European vacation this summer, type into Google Search “Europe Destination” and up pops an easy-to-browse collection of cities to visit. The instant grid of options will show top cities around Europe, as well as the best time to go, flight prices, and hotel options. Each city is easily comparable to the next without clicking between screens.
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Destinations can also be triggered by combining a location and activity in a search, such as ‘Spain surfing’, ‘New Zealand hiking’, or ‘Colorado skiing’. Google Search will suggest places that match users’ specifications and interests.
“The suggested itineraries are based on historic visits by other travelers to those places, so you can use the wisdom of the crowd and save time researching,” wrote Radhika Malpani, engineering director for Google Travel, in a post announcing the new service.
Currently, the service is exclusively on mobile, so you won’t be able to access this from your desktop or laptop computer, at least for now, and has only been launched in the US and a few select markets.
Last year, according to our internal data for google.com, we saw a whopping 50 per cent increase in travel-related questions on mobile phones,’ Google said.