For those who travel a bit for work or pleasure you may have been familiar with Google Trips, a service that scanned your email and amalgamated all of your flights, accommodations and travel bookings into a single dashboard. Google killed it, of course, and since then Google has cobbled the features into Google Maps for Android and on to google.com/travel/, but now Google is offering a progressive web app (PWA) for your device.
To get the PWA all you need to do is visit google.com/travel/ on your device and you’ll see a link to add it to your home screen. Tap on that and you’ll get a shortcut dropped onto your home screen [Editors note: the shortcut did not add to my Nova homescreen but instead to the OnePlus, unused homescreen so YMMV]. You can also add a short cut to the ChromeOS dock or to a desktop icon on a PC.
Once on your home screen, the app will load as a PWA rather than a website giving you a Chrome-less experience when using the service. Most of the features of Google Trips have found their way into Google Travel including automatic detection of trips and bookings, recommendations on what to do and the ability to curate a list of todos. Being a PWA there isn’t the option to download the local maps like there was in the original Trips app, to do that just remember to jump on over to Google maps and save them for offline use.
It’s interesting that Google has chosen to make this a PWA: is this an experiment? Is this how Google will release apps for its second-tier services? Time will tell.
I don’t travel a lot, but I do travel enough between work, Ausdroid and home that I really missed Google Trips, I am looking forward to giving Travel on Android a go.
Works really well when added to Hermit Lite Apps
It’s funny that this only got spotted recently and reported to 9to5 google by a member. I’ve had this in my app folder since October at least!