Plan a trip in one click
Why should trip planning be any more complicated than opening your browser and entering the name of your favourite city? Six months ago we launched City Tours on Google Labs with the goal of making vacation planning as easy as searching the web.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google Labs introduced City Tours as a tourism-search experiment in June 2009, positioning it as a way to turn destination queries into vacation-planning help. The earlier European Google Transit trip-planning rollout had already put Google into itinerary-oriented search tasks.
City Tours extends that task focus from getting around a city to choosing what to see in one. Its Labs status keeps the product in an experimental channel, but the move tests whether travel research can begin with an ordinary city search.
First-order effects
- Google users gain a lower-friction starting point for vacation research through City Tours, rather than assembling a city visit from separate searches.
- Google Labs gets a live test of whether destination queries can support guided trip planning, building on its June City Tours experiment.
Second-order effects
- Travel publishers and booking-oriented services face a search interface that can capture travelers at the earliest, city-selection stage, before they navigate to specialist sites.
- Google can connect more travel-intent queries to itinerary-style results, complementing the route-planning behavior established by Google Transit.
Third-order effects
- If Google can make search results useful for both local transport and sightseeing, travel planning may shift toward search-led task completion rather than a sequence of separate research tools.
- Google Labs' use as the testing venue points to a product strategy in which consumer utilities are trialed around high-intent queries before becoming broader search features.
The trend: Google is broadening search from finding travel information toward helping users complete discrete planning tasks around a destination.