What is Google City Tours?
Google has launched a new Labs innovation called Google City Tours. The premise is that Google knows what the attractions are in each region and can provide maps with links to attractions and provide relevant multi-day itineraries that help you explore the city
Why Google is no threat to DMO’s and Visitor and Convention Bureaus
While the idea is great, this Labs innovation falls flat for a number of reasons:
- Google City Tour misses obvious attractions. In my search of Leamington, Ontario Google failed to identify Point Pelee National Park as worth seeing. Point Pelee is just a few km away and a national treasure!
- Selected locations are not diverse. Most seem to be historical / museum-type attractions. When I searched cities I know well, the routes chosen overlooked obvious and locally renowned attractions such as wineries, gardens, parks, retail destinations, etc.
- Google City Tour demonstrates absolutely no local knowledge – which is critical to giving real, helpful travel advice. Human powered advice sites like TripAdvisor provide much better and more relevant information for travelers.
- Every traveler is unique. The idea of a mapped itinerary is a good one, but wouldn’t families, foodies, adventurers, shopaholics, museum lovers, etc. each want to visit different types of attractions? Yes, they would.
Google City Tours shows DMO’s what they should already be doing
Thanks to Google Labs City Tour for reminding DMO’s, visitor centres, Visitor and Convention bureaus and regional travel associations that Google provides some great technology for helping travelers find their way to meaningful, memorable travel experiences in your region.
- Google.com/maps MyMaps feature allows DMO’s and travel regions to create their own customized map – for free. This post showed how tourism regions or businesses could do this over two years ago. DMO’s should be creating custom maps using icons, routes and local knowledge to share travel information that has real value.
- Consider designing specific maps based on the interests of diverse types of travelers.
- These maps can be embedded in Web sites like ours at Northern Edge Algonqui
Thanks to Twitter friends who pointed out Google Labs latest innovation:@anneh632 @mosherifdeen @travel2dot0 @wilhelmus – Give ‘em a follow.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Good analysis. I’ll be interested to see how Google brings in local knowledge to this tool…it’s probably just a matter of time before they start embedding customer reviews for local businesses. I don’t see the revenue model as-is?
On a slightly different note: I like your idea of providing a video version of each blog post. That must add time to the publishing process, but it gives a nice alternative to reading text.
Hi Josiah,
Thank you for your comments. Fortunately / Unfortunately, Google uses computer algorithms to do the work of helping with tour routes on the City Tour Maps. They won’t have the people power necessary to create relevant maps for each community in the world. I believe it’s going to be up to DMO’s. CVB’s and other regional groups to use Google services to create maps that are actually useful to travelers.
I disagree, I think Google’s statistical and algorithmic approach will eventually rule the day. At first, it is certainly much easier to pay someone, or rely on DMOs, to make meaningful routes and tours with Google Maps. But that method doesn’t scale when you’re talking about doing it for every location on the planet.
Google (and others–including us at Openplaces) are experimenting with the semantic web to organize data (or travel data in this case) in a meaningful way for the end user.
Think about Gmail’s spam filter. Google doesn’t use linguistic filters to track spam, nor do they have people on staff who manually look for spam in our inboxes. Instead, they use statistical algorithms that are altered and improved when users click the “Report Spam” button. The algorithm gets smarter at recognizing spam when more users use it. This method scales very well. The same can be done (we hope!) for travel information.
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