Planning on traveling anytime soon? Consider using Google’s new app Trips, which acts as an automatic trip planner and travel guide. The app will organize your reservations from plane tickets to hotel and restaurant reservations, discover nearby attractions, offer food and drink suggestions. Spare yourself the international data plan too because it all works offline, including maps and directions.
The “Need to Know” section will give you useful information like the local currency, what to do in emergencies, travel to and from the airport. The app will show you upcoming and previous trips, and if you’re currently planning one, the app is very useful in discovering what to do. The “Things to Do” section will give you custom itineraries based on your length of stay, popular destinations, or really anything you’ve starred on Google. For example if you’re visiting Barcelona, you can search “Eixample District,” and it will map out buildings by Antoni Gaudi, the famous Spanish architect. If you are connected to the internet, Trips will also make current adjustments to your itinerary, such as if it’s raining or if certain destinations are open or closed.
The itineraries are created based on an algorithm that’s apparently 280 years old, based on Leonhard Euler. Google explains the four steps (you can read more about their algorithm here):
- “We start with all our destinations separate, and repeatedly connect together the closest two that aren’t yet connected. This doesn’t yet give us an itinerary, but it does connect all the destinations via a minimum spanning tree of the graph.
- We take all the destinations that have an odd number of connections in this tree (Euler proved there must be an even number of these), and carefully pair them up.
- Because all the destinations now have an even number of edges, we’ve created an Eulerian graph, so we create a route that crosses each edge exactly once.
- We now have a great route, but it might visit some places more than once. No problem, we find any double visits and simply bypass them, going directly from the predecessor to the successor.”
Trips seems like a natural trajectory after Google’s many updates to its own Maps, which has been handling some of the app’s function like recommendations for food and drinks, or Inbox’s reservation and trip bundling. Google may seem invasive to personal privacy, but when it offers accessible and personalized information, it’s hard not to like.
Source: Google