Google’s Travel website to stop creating trip summaries

From 2016–2019, the Google Trips app made for a great little utility that grouped together travel details and stored everything offline. Some of that functionality lived on in google.com/travel after the Android and iOS client was deprecated, but trip summaries are now going away this year.

According to a notice on google.com/travel, “Trip summaries won’t be available anymore beginning May 1, though your travel reservations may still appear in other Google services. To save a trip summary, click or tap on the ‘Share’ button.”

This presumably refers to both past and future trip summaries, with the former appearing by scrolling to the bottom of the website’s main tab. These summaries grouped together flight details, hotel stays, and other reservations, like for restaurants, in a nice chronological timeline.

Besides what appeared from Gmail confirmations, you could manually add places, notes, hotels, flights, trains, buses, car rentals, restaurants, and events to a trip. These summaries also provided “Discover” suggestions and surfaced “What people ask” by costs, local favorites, getting around, neighborhoods, and events/festivals, as well as travel articles from the web.

It was really quite useful for an upcoming/active trip while also great for viewing past trip details and finding places you visited. Google says you save past trip summaries by emailing them to yourself from the overflow menu.

Google says, “Travel reservations may still appear in other Google services,” in reference to Google Maps > Your Timeline > Trips tab from 2020 (which we still have today).

You see a similar list of past places you’ve visited, but each lacks the timeline functionality. Rather, you get carousels of visited places, destinations, your daily itinerary plotted on a map, and the ability to see your images from Google Photos.

Thanks, Darren