When traveling to a city that you have never been to, there are several ways to search for hidden adventures and the less advertised places. Google Maps can be used for much more than just finding your way from one place to another. Google City Tours is kind-of an enhanced Google Map database that can help you squeeze the most out of your venture into a new city by showing the most popular points of interest in an area and create an itinerary to visit those places.
Google City Tours still resides in the Google Labs part of their website. Google Labs is where Google shows their newest applications and “inventions”, all of which are still in a development, growing or stagnant status. Although Google City Tours is in the "stagnant" category, Google still asks users to use their improvement process by leaving comments and suggestions.
To use Google City Tours, after navigating to the site, which looks a lot like a Google Maps page, type the name of a major city into the search bar. Google will display all of the points-of-interest on the map of that city. It will also create an itinerary in the left column of the page. You can add or remove individual points of interest from the itinerary to modify your tour.
The individual points of interest can be further researched by clicking on their links in the itinerary window. Basic information such as business hours and phone numbers can be found for each stop on the tour. The Google Map that the tour is displayed on can be toggled between street map, satellite and terrain, just as in Google Maps.
If you use the “My Maps” feature of Goggle Maps, you can import points of interest for a specific area by using the “Import My Map” feature at the top of the page. This feature allows you to create your own tours after manually inputting the points-of-interest. If you input your own points-of-interest to an area that Google City Tours has coverage, it will combine all of the points-of-interest on the itinerary, you can then remove any unwanted stops by using the “add/remove sights” function.
Currently, there is not a print button on the tour page. There is no way to print or export the itinerary from Google. Options to get the map printed would include using the CTRL/ALT and “Print Screen” keys to copy the entire window and paste it into a word processing or photo editing program. You could also copy and paste the itinerary into a word processing program, without the map.
Google City Tours is new technology that enables travelers to navigate to interesting points of interest and otherwise hidden adventures while traveling to new locations. Where the site still lacks functionality such as using the application on a mobile device, printing, or creating a link that can be emailed, it is still useful in finding or plotting points-of-interest in a given area. There are other sites such as iStopOver which merged with PlanetEye to find accommodations and hidden travel experiences. TripIt is another site that provides itineraries based on only data that you input.
Google City Tours has been around, without much improvement, since 2009. I fear that there won’t be any more work done on it. As great as an idea that Google City Tours is, it may just be what it is until a better, more mobile application is created. With that said, Google City Tours is still a great tool to play with when exploring new places.
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