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Latest update makes Google Trips an even better travel companion

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Summer’s just around the corner so it’s a safe bet plenty of you are already eyeing the sun cream, dusting off the barbecue, and shopping for new shades.

You might even be firing up Google’s travel-assistant Trips app to help you get the most out of your upcoming vacation. For those not in the know, Google Trips is a cross-platform app designed to help you plan and organize your … well … trips. It does this by first pulling relevant information from your Gmail inbox before laying it out in various informational tabs, namely Reservations, Getting Around, Saved Places, Food & Drink, and Need to Know. It also offers up lots of ideas on what to see and do once you reach your destination.

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Having had a few months to chew over feedback following its September 2016 launch, and just in time for when most people are gearing up for a getaway, the web giant has rolled out an update for Google Trips aimed at making the app easier to use and even more useful.

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First up, you can now share all your various reservations for a particular trip in a single tap. You might want to forward all the information to your travel partner, travel buddies, or kids if it’s a family vacation, so now all you have to do is hit the arrow top right and select the recipients. This beats digging up individual hotel, flight, and travel reservations one by one, as you had to do before.

Travel plans have a tendency to change just before you set off, and Trips now takes this into account. Emily Fifer, Google’s product manager of Google Trips, explains: “For those last-minute or spontaneous changes, we built in a feature that lets you quickly update and add new details for flight, hotel, car, and restaurant reservations, even when you don’t have an email confirmation.” To do this, simply tap the “+” button bottom right in the Reservations section and enter the appropriate information.

With Wednesday’s update, Trips can now pull relevant bus and train reservations from your emails to add to your itinerary. Fifer notes in her blog post that more than three million rail and bus reservations are made by travelers every week worldwide, so the decision to incorporate them into Trips is something of a no-brainer.

For many users, Trips’ strong point is its ability to pull useful recommendations for things to see and do from its vast trove of existing data, so if you’ve never tried a travel-assistant app but want to check one out, now’s the time to try out Trips, available for both Android and iOS.

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Trevor Mogg
Trevor Mogg
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