Google's new Trips app will be your offline traveling companion

Google's app for travelers is finally ready for prime time.

Months after we first saw leaked images of Trips, the company's new app for all things travel-related, Google is finally launching the service.

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Think of Trips, out now on iOS and Android, as a kind of digital travel agent in your pocket. The app keeps track of all your upcoming and past trips and makes just about all the information you may need -- reservation details, maps, sightseeing and restaurant recommendations -- available at a glance and offline.

You begin by connecting Trips to your email account, and it'll pull in information about past and upcoming trips based on reservations that are currently in your inbox (you can also manually add your own if you have reservations elsewhere.) From there, the app creates cards for each of your upcoming and past trips.

Each trip card is divided into a series of subcategories highlighting the information Google thinks you may need to know for the trip: your reservations, a guide for things to do, food and drink, transit information as well as "need to know" information such as local emergency numbers and hospital recommendations.

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Of all of these, some of the most useful are the "things to do" and "day plans" sections, which can help you plan sightseeing. "Things to do" offers an overview of local tourist attractions, based on Google Destinations, while day plans will help you create a detailed point-by-point itinerary for an afternoon or over several days.

These plans are based on historical data Google has collected from other travelers to help travelers cram in all the most popular sites and attractions. These itineraries, which are available for Google's top 200 travel destinations, are also fully customizable so you can personalize them to your own needs.

While there are plenty of other travel apps that provide similar information and recommendations, one of the best parts about Google Trips is that all of the information is searchable and available offline -- so you can still access everything from maps and transit directions to restaurant suggestions even if you don't have a Wi-Fi or data signal.

While the app is centered around passive recommendations for now, it's not difficult to imagine a future version of the app incorporating more proactive suggestions, much like Google Now's predictive notifications. Richard Holden, the vice president of product management at Google who heads up Trips, says that's something they are thinking about with the Trips app.

"We're moving across google to more assistive-type solutions," Holden tells Mashable. "Now is an example of that and that's what we're trying to build into all of our products, so within this app we're trying to build the same kind of capabilities."

TopicsGoogle

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