Google’s Area 120 incubator has launched a new web app for keen travellers offering a curated experience pointing them towards popular attractions in 20 cities around the world.
Called Touring Bird, the web app includes information about 25,000 popular attractions around the world with information sourced from ‘travel partners’ as well as from ‘curated tips from locals and travel experts’. The web app allows you to check out things to do like local attractions, walking tours, classes, social dining and more with the ability to filter results by price, time of day and length involved – and if you find something you like, head to the website to book it.
So far there are no Australian destinations included though the Touring Bird team says they are ‘working hard to bring Touring Bird to more cities. The list of cities supported in the Touring Bird app currently includes Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Miami, New Delhi, New York City, Orlando, Paris, Prague, Rome, San Diego, San Francisco, Toronto, and Washington, D.C.
There’s a built-in bookmarking and sharing tool lets you save any attractions you find to an easily accessible list.
The functionality of Touring Bird does somewhat mirror that of an existing Google product: Google Trips, which launched in Beta back in 2016. The app curates all your reservations as well as offering information about tours, attractions and more – so how this differs will bear some investigation. In their FAQ the Touring Bird team talks about why they created the app, saying
There has been a lot of progress in the travel industry to make the flight and accommodations booking process much better, but there is still a big user need for great tools that aggregate tours and activities across providers.
If you’re heading to one of these cities in the next few months it may be worthwhile checking it out to see if you can find something interesting to do.
