Google Trips is a killer travel app for the modern tourist

I have no idea if that's actually how it works though.

But also, sometimes you don't really want a genuine local experience. Maybe you're in Washington DC for 2 days and want to squeeze in as much touristy stuff as possible. Locals aren't going to tell you about the great new exhibit at the National Gallery, they're going to tell you about their favorite dive bar on U street.

That's kind of a pretentious statement to make.

If one extreme is arriving in a city without plans, and the other extreme is meticulously planning every detail out. Then the way most people travel lies somewhere in the middle of that spectrum.

As long you enjoy your trip, then you have found the right way to travel for you personally.

It's just too easy to live some place and not seek out the unique, locally available things. Many times when visiting other countries the people working there have never done the main thing people visit that area to do. Also tastes vary greatly. These apps offer an aggregate or editorial filter for something instead of a sample size of 1.

I've always found locals to be hit and miss. From my own stand point, I would not recommend the touristy things to do in my town even though every tourist should probably do them. Same with restaurants. Locals in a given area also do not know my tastes.

What I do love is talking to locals about the history of the location. I had an AirBnB experience in Hvar, Croatia where the host lived in the bottom floor apartment. He grilled out one night with some friends he had in town from Germany, and invited us over. We had an amazing conversation about the history of Croatia with some people who were very patient with us since we could not effortlessly switch between German, Croatian and English.

Why not? I mean, the content is built by locals and tourists who visited the same places as you.

That said, there is some truth in what you're saying about talking to the locals, it's just that it's not always convenient or even accessible.

However, HERE Maps allows for you to do an offline download of the maps, and that includes building names, addresses, routing/driving, and train schedules (non-live).

I don't care much about recommendations since I plan my trips beforehand and use My Maps to save the places I want to visit. Having something that could propose multiple itineraries between a subset of those places would be nice (with multiple options related to the method used to move between places).

Trips seems more similar to a traditional guide than an app to assist travelers, you can't really build customized itineraries and even saving places is a bit cumbersome.

Let's just hope they don't kill My Maps now.

With that said, their app experience is kind of fragmented and not that strong IMO. But worth a look if you're travelling to one of the countries they cover.

https://support.google.com/inbox/answer/6228360?hl=en under the "Find your Trip in Inbox" header

This winter? Spring? I doubt it'll make it to next travel season.

[1]: https://gmail.googleblog.com/2016/02/gmailify-best-of-gmail-...

It's very frustrating that everything Google does may or may not work for those of us that just use Google Apps like a regular google account. I don't use any of the organization features. I don't manage a collection of users. All I wanted was a GMail account with my domain like Google originally offered. I feel like a second class citizen in Google's ecosystem because of my Google Apps account.

I'm not even sure what would happen if I tried switch this account to a regular Google account. Google used to (and maybe they still do) allow you to use any email address for your google account but if you wanted to use GMail you needed an @gmail.com address. If I bit the bullet and switched to a @gmail.com account could I keep my data and Play store purchases? I'm guessing the answer to that is "no" so not only would I have to lose my email address, I might have to repurchase quite a bit. Can you import all of your data from one account to another using Takeout?

My dream is that Google will offer a "Make this a regular Google account" button. I don't want to change the email address I've used for 15 years just because Google pulled the rug out from under me after getting me to switch to Google apps.

Aside: I got frustrated that none of them offer tracking brunch hours, so I made a one-page site for my city that has just that (http://www.qcbrunch.com). I'd like to do the same for kitchen hours at bars.

Yeesh, this comment is almost embarrassing. Far be it from me to educate the "well-traveled", but I suppose I'll be the one to tell you that the world is larger than the US, EU and UK: I recently spent nine months traveling around 5 continents and less than one month of that was in any of those places.

On top of that, the assertion that having data is a perfect replacement for an offline travel guide is a bizarre one. I (by choice) did all those countries without a data connection,cobbling together offline data similar to that offered by Trips that I needed whenever I found wifi. I'm not the only person I met on the road who preferred their trip to _not_ include full data access. While having a data plan is a reasonable choice as well, it's hardly a perfect replacement for the conscious choice to unplug as much as possible.