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Take and change
– Dennis Scale
In a move to prioritize Google Travel resources, it has removed a feature that allows Gmail users to view their past and upcoming trips, including everything from hotel reservations to flights and reservations, at google.com/travel.
This collection of travelers’ past and future trips, however, still appears on Google Calendar.
“This year we said Happy Travel to the Travel Summary feature at google.com/travel,” Google said in a statement. “To keep you organized, travel bookings sent to your Gmail account will continue to appear on Google Calendar, unless you’ve turned on smart features and personalization in your Gmail settings.”
The company plans to continue to focus on flights, hotels, vacation rentals and experiences.
Google introduced the Travel Summary feature in 2019, and it was the mainstay of Google Travel, which today offers flights, things to do, hotels and vacation rentals. Google Travel visitors, if signed into their Google Account, could see a notification that this trip summary feature would be discontinued for several months. It ended on May 1st.
This was a nice feature for some – if you didn’t want Google to have access to all of your travel plans and you trusted that Google wouldn’t share that information. However, Google decided to kill the free feature in Google Travel because the number of people using it was too small to justify the resources needed to maintain or develop it further, a Google spokesperson said.
In January, Google laid off 12,000 full-time employees, or about 6 percent of its workforce, but according to Google, these layoffs had nothing to do with the decision to scrap the trip summary feature on Google Travel. Google has decided to phase out this trip aggregation feature in Google Travel in 2022.
For flight and hotel confirmations, for example, Google has been able to collect travelers’ locations by mining Google-owned Gmail. Google is adding a confirmation emails module to Gmail, and as of May 1st, that module has a link to your itinerary in Google Travel.
You can see the Google Travel module in the image above from the JetBlue confirmation email.
The module had a link called View in Travel that took users to their itineraries in Google Travel.
It creates a confusing user experience because you might want to check in for your flight, but if you click on the trip view link above your confirmation email, for example, you’ll end up on Google instead of the airline’s website.
Google continues to stack these modules above Gmail users’ confirmations of airlines, accommodation providers, and tour guides, even though these modules do not have a TravelView travel link. Instead, for Gmail users who enable smart features and personalization, their trips will only appear on Google Calendar.
Photo Credit: Pictured is an image of a travel purchase on a mobile phone. Google Travel has removed a feature that aggregates Gmail users’ past and future trips. Source: Sean O’Neill/Skift
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