Great news for travellers and holiday-makers! Everyone knows detail planning before a trip is recommended but it can mean a lot of work. There will be loads of information and suggestions coming from friends, professional travel guides, or online reviews but figuring out how to squeeze all these awesome ideas within a finite window of time can be stressful. To take the stress out of trip planning, Google has just announced Google Trips, a new free app that serves as a trip planner and travel guide for anyone who is exploring a new place! Join us as we test it for our upcoming trip to Hong Kong!

1. All Your Travel Info In One Spot

Keeping track of all your flight, hotel, car and restaurant reservations when you travel can be tough. With Google Trips, all your travel reservations are automatically gathered from Gmail and organised for you into individual trips. That saves you the trouble of searching and dig up those emails. They’re waiting for you within the reservations tile. In fact, we saw our upcoming Hong Kong trip the moment we downloaded and activated the app. Creepily efficient.

2. Idiotproof Your Get Around  

Google Trips takes care of you the moment you land at the airport. We know exactly how to get to our hotel in the city!

3. Entertains The Typical Tourist In Us

Google Trips automatically recommends the usual die die must visit attractions of the destination you are in

4. Experience What The Locals Like

But it also allows you to see where the locals like to hang out so you can experience living the lives of the local folks for the day. There are other categories such as kids-friendly attractions as well.

5. Learn From Others’ Experiences

Google Trips consolidates existing reviews for each attraction so you can decide for yourself if a particular attraction is worth visiting.

6. Foodies Will Be Delighted

How can food be missing from the travel experience? The app crowdsources to bring the best makan recommendations.

7. Wave The Magic Wane

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 recognise popular areas nearby. From there, it will lay out a schedule that you can then tweak further.

8. No Limits To Your WanderLust

Each city you plan to visit have its own tab within the larger “Trip” section. You can explore as many cities as your finances allow and do a simple toggle to download the guide for each city.

9. Use It Offline 

What we loved the most is that it works offline. You can download all the different city guides to your phone before you leave, including maps and walking directions to spare you from having to use an expensive international data plan.

10. Google Knows Exactly Where You Are 

If you have privacy concerns about Google tracking your every step around the world, Google Trips is likely not the app for you. But if you’re comfortable with the trade-offs, I suspect you’ll find Trips to be a tremendously useful travel companion.

Download Google Trips Now!

Google Trips is live now on Android and iOS. Go download and give it a try now!