The biggest international sporting event the FIFA World Cup 2018, ended this week. After an absolute delight of an match, which showed why the two finalists deserved to be there, it was France who takes the glory. While the Fifa World cup provided football fans with some world class football, major upsets, surprising results and all in all entertainment, for me the world cup gave an opportunity to travel. What started as wishful thinking and hopeful plans to go experience the world cup live in Russia late last year, turned into one of the most memorable trips for me. The world cup served as a catalyst to start planning a trip, and hopefully finish some of the things on my bucket list, and although every place I visited is worthy of a separate post about how it enthralled us with spectacular views, majestic buildings and gave us many unforgettable memories, I wanted to write about the one silent companion, that helped earlier in planning the trip, streamlining stuff during the trip and storing the memories so that they are truly unforgettable.
Google and its suite of applications, have come a long way over the years and me being a fanboy of Google have been watching them develop from individual standalone apps to a full suite of intermingled applications that have made them an indispensable part of my daily life. I realized how much of a help Google has been during the preparations for the trip and the actual trip, so I thought it would be a good idea to write about these apps and how they helped me. Also I would like to point out, that Google Search was obviously a great help for the planning and execution of the trip, as that is the de-facto entry point of the internet when you are looking for information, and I would be focussing on the specific apps and how they helped me.
Google Flights
Starting out with one destination in mind, which was Russia, as the world cup was being hosted there and a fixed duration for our trip we started with looking at options in and around Russia. Google flights does an excellent job of aggregating various airlines and makes shortlisting flights and deciding on a travel itinerary based on flight availability and ticket costs a simple task. It’s elegant design, the interface overlayed on Google maps and helpful suggestions let you easily compare various destinations and focus on the most relevant things about the flight, the duration and the cost of the flights. Also, like a good aggregator should Google does not push you into booking one flight over the other, it simply shows the various available options and redirects you to the airline’s website for the actual booking of the flight.
Gmail
With so many bookings done, it was important to have all the tickets and various reservations handy and quick to access specially if you have a cluttered Inbox. Since I was using my gmail Id for all of these, it was super simple to keep all these mails together in a single place. I have been a user of gmail almost since it launched and am used to storing important emails by starring them. A nifty feature that Gmail provides is to have stars of different types, that you can cycle through as you click on the star icon.
So I simply assigned the blue star to all mails I thought I would need to access until the trip. The mails clould now be easily accessed under the Starred mails tab (both on the web and the mobile app), and since I don’t star mails very often all of these were bunched together neatly so I didn’t have to search for the right mail.
One could also just as easily assign a separate label to all these trip related mails and have them accessible in the same way as starred mails.
Additionally, the mobile Gmail app has an option to customize notifications and syncing for each label (including Starred) individually, enabling which allows you to access these mails even if you have no internet connectivity.
Accomodations
This is one area where google is lacking. You could use Google maps to search for hotels around an area, but the results are largely unsatisfying and the reviews etc. hardly dependable. Here sites like booking.com and AirBnB shine and do an excellent job with options, pricing and relevant information.
Google Trips
This is when the magic of the Google ecosystem really starts showing. Combining its knowledge of you, google maps and the wealth of information available on the internet, this app lets you plan your trip to the minutest detail before the actual trip. With the tickets and accommodations booked, and the mails residing in your inbox, the Google Trips app automatically detects your upcoming trips and presents you with a nice timeline view of all your upcoming and past trips (Side Note: If your trip/cities are not detected automatically, you can always manually add trips in the app). The app then continues to provide a plethora of information about each of the cities in your trip. It pulls up information about your reservations and accommodations and also provides suggestions on Things to Do and places to visit in the city. You get information on places to eat, travel tips for the city, pre made day plans etc inside the app. The best feature of the app for me was that it reminds you a couple of days before the trip to download offline maps of the cities, and all the above mentioned information available offline. A few clicks and you are all set without any worries about searching for wifi and or data when you travel to access this information.
Google Maps
With so much information available, you realize that you can’t possibly visit everything being suggested in the time you have, so now you have to shortlist places that you want to see. The easiest way to do that I found was to simple create a list on Google maps, and start saving each of these places into the list. A couple of taps for each place and you are good to go. What’s more is that these places automatically show up inside the Google Trips app under the Saved places for each trip and are available offline.
The next thing to do is to save offline areas (which if you use Google trips, are suggested to be downloaded automatically). Saving areas offline, allows you to search for most places offline and also see the driving route/directions to these places. This comes a lot in handy when you are walking around in the city from place to place specially in places where you don’t speak the language and asking someone for directions is tough.
While traveling, maps was the one app that I kept checking constantly as after saving places to a list on the map, it allowed us to check which of the places are in our current vicinity and then plan our route/timing accordingly. With Uber and Ola cabs becoming mainstream we have grown quite accustomed to using Google maps for navigation while driving. The maps app shines for other modes of transportation as long as you have data. In a country like Russia, where the alphabets are different the usual english alphabets that we are used to, the direction to go from one place to another via the metro/buses was a life saver. You could easily open maps, let it guide you to the nearest station, know the next arrival time of your intended mode of transportation, know when to get off and walk down to your destination following the directions on the map.
Google Now
Google promotes google now as an assistant that surfaces information that you need, when you need it and I have to admit it does a neat job of doing so. Whether it is a reminder to leave for the airport to reach in time for your flight, or your boarding pass as you enter the airport. The time back home if you are in a different time zone, the weather forecast of your current location and the exchange rate of the currency are all available in one swipe so you don’t have to guess anymore. Google Now has a way of being present with information that you never really thought you’d need, but now that you have it you realize that it actually helped.
Google Translate
When traveling to a non english speaking country, not knowing the language can be a real problem. From reading the items on the menu, reading signs on the metro station, asking someone for directions or simply striking up a conversation with the cute girl/guy you saw at the restaurant, Google Translate is a life saver. With its feature that allows downloading the languages (multiple) that you might need, you can use translate phrases back and forth without worrying about having internet connectivity. The camera can be used to point at signs and see the translated text in-place on the image. We used this feature a lot to translate signs/menus on many of the roadside vendors and to decide which ice cream flavor we wanted to have.
Lastly, the feature that impressed me the most was the conversation feature, which only works with internet connectivity. We could just turn it on and speak normally in english to the person in front of us and the app reads out the translated message in almost real time. It then detects the other person speaking and translates their response back to you in english. Almost felt like a normal conversation between two people speaking different languages, no wonder they say Technology is a great unifier of the people.
Google Photos
Is it really a trip if you don’t click a tonne of photos? But unfortunately, the photos we click usually are never shared with everyone and are slowly forgotten buried under the countless selfies and/or Whatsapp forwards in your phone’s gallery. Google photos changes all that. With auto backup enabled over wifi, you can click photos to your heart’s content and rest assured that all the photos would be uploaded to the cloud the instant you connect to your hotel wifi when get back home that day. Google provides free unlimited storage for photos up to a resolution of 2048×1960, which is more than enough for the casual traveling photographer.
The photos app then harnesses the power of Google awesome AI and ML tools, to automatically pick up the best photos you have clicked, edit them, apply effects and present you with ready to share images. In addition it usually makes a nice video with a slideshow of the highlights of your day/trip with catchy background music. These videos are a great way to share with someone the highlights of your trip, and all of this happens without you even raising a finger.
By the end of the trip you realize you have so many photos scattered around multiple devices and with Google photos since the images are already backed up on the cloud it’s again just a couple of taps to create a shared album where all your friends can simply add their photos so that you never lose a single captured moment and all of them are available in a single common album.
Photos not on a mobile device, like from a digital camera can be uploaded to the same album easily from the desktop app or the website and those also get the Google treatment of auto enhancement.
One feature that I would like to see in Google photos is the ability to selectively share stuff from the same album with different groups of people, since that currently requires creating separate albums for each group, and copying the images into each of those albums.
Last but not the least, these are some of the apps that also can be useful when planning a trip
- Google Keep – For listing out things you need to pack for the trip, or taking quick notes whenever required.
- Google Lens – Gives an easy way to pull up information about what you see simply by pointing the camera at it.
- Google Play Music – Carry your favorite music with you anywhere, and with data being so cheap, you don’t even have to worry about storage space on your device since you can stream any song you are in the mood to listen.
In the end, these apps can help you along the way in planning the trip, but what makes such trips memorable are the experiences, the friends you travel with and the friends you make. No app can replace those, but these sure help you relax and not worry about the nitty gritty details of the travel, but rather focus on fully enjoying the place.
What are some of your travel hacks that you use while planning or during a trip? Feel free to post about those in the comments.
Tel'aran'rhiod 