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This week’s dead Google product is Google Trips

311 points by rrreese 7y ago

Scrantonicity 7y ago
This was a good product by Google, and I really wished it was available as a web app to make trip planning easier, but i don't see why we can't have both a web version as well as an offline app.
- pjc50 7y ago
  I tried it and thought the big benefit was supposed to be that it was offline - so you can use it without expensive roaming data, or while on a plane, in a tunnel etc.
- m-p-3 7y ago
  I wouldn't mind if it was a Progressive Web App that caches the data.
- xtracto 7y ago
  I wish Google would give their employees the option to create spin-off startups of products they kill or killed.
pavel_lishin 7y ago
I think Google's endgame is for everyone to live entirely in Gmail, Maps and maybe Search - as a fallback for when they haven't predicted exactly what it is you want at that precise moment in time.
- aembleton 7y ago
  I only got the Trips app because Inbox was shutdown and I was going to miss that functionality. If they could move trips into Gmail then I'd be happy with that.
ourmandave 7y ago
That's a shame about Google Trips. But on the plus side... oh.
Sujan 7y ago
Oh no, I loved that app! It was so easy to create lists of stuff to visit, as it was basically a "special view" for Google Maps.
stunt 7y ago
The best part is the title!
client4 7y ago
I honestly thought Trips was a nice product. Hopefully the usefulness of the application lives on somewhere in Google. When I went to Shanghai the fist time it was incredibly useful to have downloaded reservations as my Google Fi SIM wasn't working well the first few days.
kiwijamo 7y ago
Does TripIt provide a similar function?
- JOnAgain 7y ago
  TripIt basically died after acquisition. Hasn’t done anything new or interesting in years.
  - jeromegv 7y ago
    The other way of looking at it is that TripIt still provide a reliable service, that works the same way it worked 5 years ago, but still work perfectly fine for the use case it was built.
dopylitty 7y ago
In a way Google creating and then killing all these applications is great for other developers looking for a product to create. They don't have to do their now market research, just check how many and how bitterly people complain about Google killing the product. If people loved Google Trips now is a great time to create your own Trips application and cash in on the people disappointed by Google.
- yingw787 7y ago
  How much would people pay for a trips app? I was looking at starting something like that out of college but my market would have been other college students and grads. My impression of the trips market is that you upsell boomers on travel packages (no in-depth market analysis though). I did keep up some docs around the project, though I'd probably do a full rewrite it's been three years: https://yingw787.github.io/traveltile_docs/ https://yingw787.github.io/traveltile_docs/
  - Eridrus 7y ago
    There are multiple ways to get this started, and not all of them have to be direct to consumer. There are companies who specialize in organising travel, which could be aided by better software. Personally, I would pay for a travel planning app, but the pricing structure would have to be right since I'm not going to pay for a subscription for something I use infrequently. I think the key thing here is that travel is already very expensive, so there is money to be made here in improving the process, but skimming some ad/referral revenue off a large volume is the easiest way to do so. I looked for a travel planning app when I went to Mexico City last year and was generally not impressed with the offerings, so I just ended up pinning everything I wanted to do in Google Maps.
    - Eridrus 7y ago
      To continue with the theme of people paying for things in this area: My wife still buys travel books for cities. Books are definitely not my favourite medium and I would definitely consider paying for the information online.
nneonneo 7y ago
Wait, seriously? First they killed Inbox, which helpfully aggregated trip emails into one place, upon which a bunch of folks told me to try Trips; now they kill Trips in quick succession? I had dozens of trips organized very nicely in Inbox... Ugh. And I’m still rather unwilling to hand over my email to a third party. Is there any nice way to organize trips anymore?
- tssva 7y ago
  They are ending Trips because the functionality has been rolled into Google Travel. You can access your trips at https://google.com/travel https://google.com/travel.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - m-p-3 7y ago
    Which would be fine if it was possible to use while offline, data roaming isn't cheap.
    - Liquid_Fire 7y ago
      Even disregarding roaming (e.g. travelling within the EU so roaming is free), having offline access makes it easy to plan what places to visit while flying to your destination.
      - asdff 7y ago
        It's also critical if you land late and are scrambling to your next destination and don't have service in this connecting country you are in and there is no wifi at all and your phone is on 10% and the ramshackle destination airport has exactly two plugs, one of them broken. I still print my itineraries and tickets and it's saved me plenty of times when my phone has failed me.
        7y ago
vowelless 7y ago
I actually really enjoyed this product! Are there good alternatives?
toss1 7y ago
Brilliant! Google are shutting down the Trips app on August 5th, right in the middle of the heaviest summer travel season. For those using it heavily, one could hardly pick a more inconvenient date. Sometime in October or November, between the summer and holiday/new year travel surges would be more appropriate. But, obviously less convenient for Google. Google are becoming like their own version of Murphy's Law: The app you rely on will be shut down at a random time, and at the most inconvenient possible time.
libria 7y ago
Since a lot of Googlers read HN, a question for you: How do you all feel about Google's Launch 'n Kill culture? I did use Trips for travel once and liked it, but hesitated to get invested in it lest it dies one day (today). I approach most new Google products with the same trepidation. On the other hand, I like Google's start-uppy environment and desire to experiment with anything because it could lead to great products like Gmail. My question is about that circular dependency of a Google product only lasting if it gets popular and a product not getting popular because we think it won't last. If launching is just for annual reviews, and you don't care about the result, I get that but am just curious if any Googlers think the Google Product Stigma needs fixing. Answer as throwaway if needed.
- justicezyx 7y ago
  Google only interested in billion customer products, sorry, that just what the culture is...
  - jfoster 7y ago
    You're right. The exact number might not be right, but the gist certainly is. For that reason, I don't think they should even be exploring products like this. Especially with their volumes of search data, they ought to know whether a product like this will be successful enough for them or not.
- evmar 7y ago
  [google engineer, not a lot of insight into product decisions] Option one: every product Google makes it supports forever regardless of whether it succeeds or not, where "success" for Google is defined as "billions of users". (Ref all the people laughing at why G+ was still going despite not being popular. [Note: I've read the 'unpopular' thing was disputed; I don't know the actual numbers.]) In this world Google can never attempt a product unless they've verified ahead of time it will become a category-defining product (Chrome, Android, Gmail). Option two: occasionally some products will test the waters and fail. I think it's easy to say at the time of a product failure (or even at launch: see the people who scoffed at iPod and Dropbox) to say that it was destined to fail -- it's pretty much guaranteed to happen on HN because people love to shit on and watch other people shit on others' work, for some sad human nature reason -- but difficult to see which of those guaranteed-to-fail products will actually eventually succeed. So option one mostly means you never launch new products. Big companies faced with this dilemma (the Ciscos or Microsofts or even Facebooks) deal with it by waiting for startups to succeed then buying the result (Whatsapp, Instagram, Github). Famously at Microsoft if you had a good idea the correct way to implement it was to leave, implement as new company, get reacquired. That may become the case at Google too. Instead Google tries to do option two. I think you could argue about the rate of launch/fail in category two but it doesn't bother me too much. I recall a comment from the Netflix founder about how they had too many successful shows and how that is a problem, that they were playing it too safe. I also use emacs as my editor because I know it's old enough that it's not gonna change out from under me. When I care about reliability in this way I choose accordingly. Nothing in life in permanent; I evaluate new Google products like I evaluate random startup products, which is to say they may randomly disappear in a year and I factor that in. For example Keep seems like a nice product and I sometimes use it for grocery lists but I'm not gonna put anything important in it (disclaimer: I have absolutely no insider facts about Keep, that is just my feeling about it based on the previous reasoning).
myko 7y ago
Ouch, I loved this product. Especially storing all the data for a particular trip offline. It made planning a breeze, and helped when changing plans on the fly as well.
Proven 7y ago
Haha, that's great - every time I read about some Google product termination I'm happy that I haven't invested any time or effort into using any Google service except Search (and Gmail, but I use it only for free web site registrations and similar garbage so I can't say I care whether it exists or not)
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
lawrenceyan 7y ago
Doesn't look dead to me??? https://www.google.com/travel https://www.google.com/travel
- c0vfefe 7y ago
  It will expire in August.
kosei 7y ago
And this is happening the same day they show off their brand new Stadia product? Oops.
crazygringo 7y ago
> The death of Google Trips is part of Google's big travel revamp. The company recently launched the Google Travel website, which in addition to most of the Trips information, also serves as (wait for it...) a search engine for hotels, flights, and travel agency-style combo bookings... Google's message notes that "many"—not "all"—of Trips' features will "live on in other Google products." Apparently those two features are Google Maps and Google Search. So... they've just reorganized most of the features to different websites, instead of keeping them locked in an app you have to download. Doesn't seem that bad. I don't think this really counts as a noteworthy "dead" product, just a refactoring of features across properties.
- rconti 7y ago
  The offline content component of Google Trips is the best part though.
  - ghostbrainalpha 7y ago
    That's true... but any Google product that focuses on being "good offline" is fighting against the momentum of every other part of Google.
    - zymhan 7y ago
      Not true, Google Maps has added offline storage over the years that is quite helpful, and the feature has gotten better. Google Docs for Chrome can be used offline as well.
      - magashna 7y ago
        Google Maps offline has saved me a lot of headaches when traveling
      - maxxxxx 7y ago
        I still don’t understand why they implemented this but it works very well. I wish OSM maps had the same level of offline search and routing.
dgudkov 7y ago
The title is sensationalist. The product is not dead but rebranded and redesigned. It's the app that is dead. Google Travel (which is a web site) replaces Google Trips (which is an application) and is pretty much the same product. Abundance of ads (or rather partners' offerings) on Google Flight is a fair point, however it's a bit ironic to see this shaming coming from ArsTechnica that itself relies heavily on ad revenue.
- Marsymars 7y ago
  > Abundance of ads (or rather partners' offerings) on Google Flight is a fair point, however it's a bit ironic to see this shaming coming from ArsTechnica that itself relies heavily on ad revenue. It's a news site that has an paid option for an ad-free and tracking-free subscription. I'm not sure how it could be less ironic unless it came from a public news service that has a blanket ban on advertisements. (Do any of those exist?)
- Liquid_Fire 7y ago
  The killer feature of Google Trips for me (and I'm sure many other users) was the offline support, so for us it may as well be dead.
ilamont 7y ago
Tangential: What has people's experience been with Google Flights? It's quick and I like the calendar view for seeing different price options, but the results don't always correspond with the reality when I click through to the airline's website.
- rb808 7y ago
  In the past I have used flights religiously. Its been great for me. I've even been in situations where it said a price X, I went direct to united.com and the price was X+10%, and when I went back to google flights and clicked through I really did get X. However this year I did for the first time get the other way around where I couldn't buy the price it said was available. I've also noticed Kayak now just as good or better, and flighthub is generally great too. So for me it used to be the best, now is good, but nothing amazing.
- izacus 7y ago
  It's still the only site I've found which allows me to do searches of "show me cheapest flights to this part of the world in next 6 months" type. It's pretty amazing for planning vacations because of that.
parf02 7y ago
one google Trips feature that I really loved, was it's curated day plans. Basically, each major city in the world had a nice list of day plans per city-district. I followed this guide in Barcelona, Montpellier, Nice, Marseille, New York City, Cannes and it always gave excellent recommendations. Sure it was only the very touristy spots, but it was nice to have a curated day plan for each day I was travelling. If anyone knows of anything similar please comment :)
- otras 7y ago
  Have you tried the Google Travel explore page? There's a "Suggested day plans" section you may enjoy. For example, Barcelona: https://www.google.com/destination?q=barcelona+city&output=search&dest_mid=/m/01f62&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjHnbqZ6tXiAhUun-AKHaIrCuoQ6tEBKAQwAHoECAoQBw#dest_mid=/m/01f62&tcfs=EhUKCC9tLzAxZjYyEglCYXJjZWxvbmE https://www.google.com/destination?q=barcelona+city&output=s... Disclaimer: I work on a different travel-related product at Google.
BuckRogers 7y ago
I used this app. Google is infuriating. Like many here, I've been migrating off of as many Google products as possible. I just don't trust them for anything related to privacy or reliability. Gmail is the tough one for me. Looking at moving everything to my Outlook.com address or paying for additional iCloud storage and using my iCloud.com email. My end goal is to limit my exposure to Google to an as-needed basis, using only Youtube and Maps. For Google Maps, I'll likely start using Apple Maps more and Tesla's service when I get my Model 3, leaving Youtube as the only Google product I use with any frequency. "Google it" has become a pejorative to eff something up. Trips, you've been Googled.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
techntoke 7y ago
I noticed that Google has revamped Google Voice yet again after nearly killing it off entirely for Hangouts. Now it looks like they are planning on moving away from Hangouts for Google Voice interactions. Any news here?
lquist 7y ago
Honest question: Why does Google's experimentation with products get termed "killing" products vs Amazon/etc.'s gets framed as "experimentation"
- scarface74 7y ago
  What high profile product has Amazon killed - besides the Fire phone.
  - notatoad 7y ago
    Is trips a high-profile product?
stcredzero 7y ago
Is there a "Google Deathwatch" website? Not one that can be easily googled, as of this moment.
- angarg12 7y ago
  Like this? https://gcemetery.co/ https://gcemetery.co/
  - stcredzero 7y ago
    They killed Nest!? Nest did make some egregious mistakes, but still. The way Google is killing off stuff reminds me of Microsoft in the 90's touting, then killing APIs.
    - notatoad 7y ago
      Google did not kill off nest. They killed the "works with nest" API and replaced it with "works with Google Assistant".
      - stcredzero 7y ago
        So then they are literally touting, then killing off APIs.
        notatoad 7y ago
        Your comment said they killed nest. That was incorrect.
        stcredzero 7y ago
        Yes. I based that off of one of the tombstones I saw on one of the sites, but that was hyperbolic.
- jakub_g 7y ago
  https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
NN88 7y ago
just bring back the RSS Reader again FFS.
nkkollaw 7y ago
Google is becoming the new Yahoo! I don't get why they don't realize that by making people rely on all these experiments (see Inbox) and then shutting them down their brand suffers immensely. I've migrated all my photo collection to Photos--although I back it up regularly--and I'm seriously considering going back to Apple Photos. You just cannot trust Google to keep products working anymore.
- oarsinsync 7y ago
  > I've migrated all my photo collection to Photos--although I back it up regularly--and I'm seriously considering going back to Apple Photos I hope you either pay for storage or backup before you upload, or you may be disappointed to discover your photos are lower quality than they were when they were shot.
  - nkkollaw 7y ago
    Yes, I pay. Good point, though. Although, I'm not sure my pictures would get downsized since their limits are pretty generous. The worst is videos. My phone shoots them at 4K and they would get resized at 1080p.
mikeokner 7y ago
Seems like as good a time as any to Show HN (or shamelessly plug my side-hustle, depending on how you look at it): https://www.naverator.com https://www.naverator.com It's a trip organizer/sharing platform that aims to be the place for you to collect all the various bits of information & reservations & such for your trip. Currently web-only but mobile on the roadmap as well as offline/export functionality which was one of the nice features of Google Trips. Feedback welcome. I know it's still a little rough around the edges. Hoping to have things buttoned up nicely in another week or two and then start advertising it more officially to everyday folks.
- pkulak 7y ago
  Sign up was a bit rough. Had to copy-paste a code from email (no link to click), then it just said I was confirmed and I could log in. Seems like it's pretty common for all of that to just be done through a single click on an email link. But do you even care if folks use a bogus email?
  - mikeokner 7y ago
    It's all done through AWS Cognito so it's something I got working with the default code-based method and then moved on to other things. I'll look at reprioritizing a confirmation link to smooth that process. I do care somewhat about confirming accounts in general just because it cuts down on spam/abuse, and it ensures someone didn't fat-finger their email and then can't regain access when they forget their password in a month. Also, I have on the roadmap a feature for configurable reminders/notifications, and services like AWS SES track bounces. Too many invalid recipients and you run the risk of getting throttled or suspended.
oliyoung 7y ago
> "its good advice bt im Not sure uve had a startup before." [sic] > And this is spot on. Is it though? Amazon's Free tier is more than enough to run a small early/proof-of-concept startup. Even ignoring Docker etc, Elastic Beanstalk is literally set and forget platform. There's very little excuse for not running something fault tolerant and modern. At least, that's how I've stood up the last three startups i've lead engineering at.
- lucideer 7y ago
  Hoping this reply comes across neither offensive nor fawning, but... this comment seems like a pretty spot on example of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge
  - oliyoung 7y ago
    It doesn't :) I understand your point, but with that level of technical detail in a post, claiming that "we're just a small startup so we built it ourself" and "you don't know because you've never worked in a startup" feels like .. I don't know .. an excuse?
frequentnapper 7y ago
it would be awesome if google travel would allow me to also see photos of each of my past trips in addition to all the travel details. They already live in Google Photos.
danols 7y ago
I have stopped investing time in cool/interesting Google consumer products that does not have a legit chance to reach at least 50%+ user penetration a long time ago. They are always doomed.
telltruth 7y ago
This is so eerily similar to killing of Picasa. They killed a great functional popular app and forced everyone to mediocre half assed website. Not sure what is going on at Google. Is there anyone in charge here?

311 points by rrreese 7y ago

This was a good product by Google, and I really wished it was available as a web app to make trip planning easier, but i don't see why we can't have both a web version as well as an offline app.

pjc50 7y ago
I tried it and thought the big benefit was supposed to be that it was offline - so you can use it without expensive roaming data, or while on a plane, in a tunnel etc.
m-p-3 7y ago
I wouldn't mind if it was a Progressive Web App that caches the data.
xtracto 7y ago
I wish Google would give their employees the option to create spin-off startups of products they kill or killed.

pavel_lishin 7y ago

I think Google's endgame is for everyone to live entirely in Gmail, Maps and maybe Search - as a fallback for when they haven't predicted exactly what it is you want at that precise moment in time.

aembleton 7y ago
I only got the Trips app because Inbox was shutdown and I was going to miss that functionality. If they could move trips into Gmail then I'd be happy with that.

ourmandave 7y ago

That's a shame about Google Trips. But on the plus side... oh.

Sujan 7y ago

Oh no, I loved that app! It was so easy to create lists of stuff to visit, as it was basically a "special view" for Google Maps.

stunt 7y ago

The best part is the title!

client4 7y ago

I honestly thought Trips was a nice product. Hopefully the usefulness of the application lives on somewhere in Google. When I went to Shanghai the fist time it was incredibly useful to have downloaded reservations as my Google Fi SIM wasn't working well the first few days.

kiwijamo 7y ago

Does TripIt provide a similar function?

JOnAgain 7y ago
TripIt basically died after acquisition. Hasn’t done anything new or interesting in years.
- jeromegv 7y ago
  The other way of looking at it is that TripIt still provide a reliable service, that works the same way it worked 5 years ago, but still work perfectly fine for the use case it was built.

dopylitty 7y ago

In a way Google creating and then killing all these applications is great for other developers looking for a product to create. They don't have to do their now market research, just check how many and how bitterly people complain about Google killing the product. If people loved Google Trips now is a great time to create your own Trips application and cash in on the people disappointed by Google.

yingw787 7y ago
How much would people pay for a trips app? I was looking at starting something like that out of college but my market would have been other college students and grads. My impression of the trips market is that you upsell boomers on travel packages (no in-depth market analysis though). I did keep up some docs around the project, though I'd probably do a full rewrite it's been three years: https://yingw787.github.io/traveltile_docs/ https://yingw787.github.io/traveltile_docs/
- Eridrus 7y ago
  There are multiple ways to get this started, and not all of them have to be direct to consumer. There are companies who specialize in organising travel, which could be aided by better software. Personally, I would pay for a travel planning app, but the pricing structure would have to be right since I'm not going to pay for a subscription for something I use infrequently. I think the key thing here is that travel is already very expensive, so there is money to be made here in improving the process, but skimming some ad/referral revenue off a large volume is the easiest way to do so. I looked for a travel planning app when I went to Mexico City last year and was generally not impressed with the offerings, so I just ended up pinning everything I wanted to do in Google Maps.
  - Eridrus 7y ago
    To continue with the theme of people paying for things in this area: My wife still buys travel books for cities. Books are definitely not my favourite medium and I would definitely consider paying for the information online.

nneonneo 7y ago

Wait, seriously? First they killed Inbox, which helpfully aggregated trip emails into one place, upon which a bunch of folks told me to try Trips; now they kill Trips in quick succession? I had dozens of trips organized very nicely in Inbox... Ugh. And I’m still rather unwilling to hand over my email to a third party. Is there any nice way to organize trips anymore?

tssva 7y ago
They are ending Trips because the functionality has been rolled into Google Travel. You can access your trips at https://google.com/travel https://google.com/travel.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- m-p-3 7y ago
  Which would be fine if it was possible to use while offline, data roaming isn't cheap.
  - Liquid_Fire 7y ago
    Even disregarding roaming (e.g. travelling within the EU so roaming is free), having offline access makes it easy to plan what places to visit while flying to your destination.
    - asdff 7y ago
      It's also critical if you land late and are scrambling to your next destination and don't have service in this connecting country you are in and there is no wifi at all and your phone is on 10% and the ramshackle destination airport has exactly two plugs, one of them broken. I still print my itineraries and tickets and it's saved me plenty of times when my phone has failed me.
      - 7y ago

vowelless 7y ago

I actually really enjoyed this product! Are there good alternatives?

toss1 7y ago

Brilliant! Google are shutting down the Trips app on August 5th, right in the middle of the heaviest summer travel season. For those using it heavily, one could hardly pick a more inconvenient date. Sometime in October or November, between the summer and holiday/new year travel surges would be more appropriate. But, obviously less convenient for Google. Google are becoming like their own version of Murphy's Law: The app you rely on will be shut down at a random time, and at the most inconvenient possible time.

libria 7y ago

Since a lot of Googlers read HN, a question for you: How do you all feel about Google's Launch 'n Kill culture? I did use Trips for travel once and liked it, but hesitated to get invested in it lest it dies one day (today). I approach most new Google products with the same trepidation. On the other hand, I like Google's start-uppy environment and desire to experiment with anything because it could lead to great products like Gmail. My question is about that circular dependency of a Google product only lasting if it gets popular and a product not getting popular because we think it won't last. If launching is just for annual reviews, and you don't care about the result, I get that but am just curious if any Googlers think the Google Product Stigma needs fixing. Answer as throwaway if needed.

justicezyx 7y ago
Google only interested in billion customer products, sorry, that just what the culture is...
- jfoster 7y ago
  You're right. The exact number might not be right, but the gist certainly is. For that reason, I don't think they should even be exploring products like this. Especially with their volumes of search data, they ought to know whether a product like this will be successful enough for them or not.
evmar 7y ago
[google engineer, not a lot of insight into product decisions] Option one: every product Google makes it supports forever regardless of whether it succeeds or not, where "success" for Google is defined as "billions of users". (Ref all the people laughing at why G+ was still going despite not being popular. [Note: I've read the 'unpopular' thing was disputed; I don't know the actual numbers.]) In this world Google can never attempt a product unless they've verified ahead of time it will become a category-defining product (Chrome, Android, Gmail). Option two: occasionally some products will test the waters and fail. I think it's easy to say at the time of a product failure (or even at launch: see the people who scoffed at iPod and Dropbox) to say that it was destined to fail -- it's pretty much guaranteed to happen on HN because people love to shit on and watch other people shit on others' work, for some sad human nature reason -- but difficult to see which of those guaranteed-to-fail products will actually eventually succeed. So option one mostly means you never launch new products. Big companies faced with this dilemma (the Ciscos or Microsofts or even Facebooks) deal with it by waiting for startups to succeed then buying the result (Whatsapp, Instagram, Github). Famously at Microsoft if you had a good idea the correct way to implement it was to leave, implement as new company, get reacquired. That may become the case at Google too. Instead Google tries to do option two. I think you could argue about the rate of launch/fail in category two but it doesn't bother me too much. I recall a comment from the Netflix founder about how they had too many successful shows and how that is a problem, that they were playing it too safe. I also use emacs as my editor because I know it's old enough that it's not gonna change out from under me. When I care about reliability in this way I choose accordingly. Nothing in life in permanent; I evaluate new Google products like I evaluate random startup products, which is to say they may randomly disappear in a year and I factor that in. For example Keep seems like a nice product and I sometimes use it for grocery lists but I'm not gonna put anything important in it (disclaimer: I have absolutely no insider facts about Keep, that is just my feeling about it based on the previous reasoning).

myko 7y ago

Ouch, I loved this product. Especially storing all the data for a particular trip offline. It made planning a breeze, and helped when changing plans on the fly as well.

Proven 7y ago

Haha, that's great - every time I read about some Google product termination I'm happy that I haven't invested any time or effort into using any Google service except Search (and Gmail, but I use it only for free web site registrations and similar garbage so I can't say I care whether it exists or not)

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

lawrenceyan 7y ago

Doesn't look dead to me??? https://www.google.com/travel https://www.google.com/travel

c0vfefe 7y ago
It will expire in August.

kosei 7y ago

And this is happening the same day they show off their brand new Stadia product? Oops.

crazygringo 7y ago

> The death of Google Trips is part of Google's big travel revamp. The company recently launched the Google Travel website, which in addition to most of the Trips information, also serves as (wait for it...) a search engine for hotels, flights, and travel agency-style combo bookings... Google's message notes that "many"—not "all"—of Trips' features will "live on in other Google products." Apparently those two features are Google Maps and Google Search. So... they've just reorganized most of the features to different websites, instead of keeping them locked in an app you have to download. Doesn't seem that bad. I don't think this really counts as a noteworthy "dead" product, just a refactoring of features across properties.

rconti 7y ago
The offline content component of Google Trips is the best part though.
- ghostbrainalpha 7y ago
  That's true... but any Google product that focuses on being "good offline" is fighting against the momentum of every other part of Google.
  - zymhan 7y ago
    Not true, Google Maps has added offline storage over the years that is quite helpful, and the feature has gotten better. Google Docs for Chrome can be used offline as well.
    - magashna 7y ago
      Google Maps offline has saved me a lot of headaches when traveling
    - maxxxxx 7y ago
      I still don’t understand why they implemented this but it works very well. I wish OSM maps had the same level of offline search and routing.

dgudkov 7y ago

The title is sensationalist. The product is not dead but rebranded and redesigned. It's the app that is dead. Google Travel (which is a web site) replaces Google Trips (which is an application) and is pretty much the same product. Abundance of ads (or rather partners' offerings) on Google Flight is a fair point, however it's a bit ironic to see this shaming coming from ArsTechnica that itself relies heavily on ad revenue.

Marsymars 7y ago
> Abundance of ads (or rather partners' offerings) on Google Flight is a fair point, however it's a bit ironic to see this shaming coming from ArsTechnica that itself relies heavily on ad revenue. It's a news site that has an paid option for an ad-free and tracking-free subscription. I'm not sure how it could be less ironic unless it came from a public news service that has a blanket ban on advertisements. (Do any of those exist?)
Liquid_Fire 7y ago
The killer feature of Google Trips for me (and I'm sure many other users) was the offline support, so for us it may as well be dead.

ilamont 7y ago

Tangential: What has people's experience been with Google Flights? It's quick and I like the calendar view for seeing different price options, but the results don't always correspond with the reality when I click through to the airline's website.

rb808 7y ago
In the past I have used flights religiously. Its been great for me. I've even been in situations where it said a price X, I went direct to united.com and the price was X+10%, and when I went back to google flights and clicked through I really did get X. However this year I did for the first time get the other way around where I couldn't buy the price it said was available. I've also noticed Kayak now just as good or better, and flighthub is generally great too. So for me it used to be the best, now is good, but nothing amazing.
izacus 7y ago
It's still the only site I've found which allows me to do searches of "show me cheapest flights to this part of the world in next 6 months" type. It's pretty amazing for planning vacations because of that.

parf02 7y ago

one google Trips feature that I really loved, was it's curated day plans. Basically, each major city in the world had a nice list of day plans per city-district. I followed this guide in Barcelona, Montpellier, Nice, Marseille, New York City, Cannes and it always gave excellent recommendations. Sure it was only the very touristy spots, but it was nice to have a curated day plan for each day I was travelling. If anyone knows of anything similar please comment :)

otras 7y ago
Have you tried the Google Travel explore page? There's a "Suggested day plans" section you may enjoy. For example, Barcelona: https://www.google.com/destination?q=barcelona+city&output=search&dest_mid=/m/01f62&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjHnbqZ6tXiAhUun-AKHaIrCuoQ6tEBKAQwAHoECAoQBw#dest_mid=/m/01f62&tcfs=EhUKCC9tLzAxZjYyEglCYXJjZWxvbmE https://www.google.com/destination?q=barcelona+city&output=s... Disclaimer: I work on a different travel-related product at Google.

BuckRogers 7y ago

I used this app. Google is infuriating. Like many here, I've been migrating off of as many Google products as possible. I just don't trust them for anything related to privacy or reliability. Gmail is the tough one for me. Looking at moving everything to my Outlook.com address or paying for additional iCloud storage and using my iCloud.com email. My end goal is to limit my exposure to Google to an as-needed basis, using only Youtube and Maps. For Google Maps, I'll likely start using Apple Maps more and Tesla's service when I get my Model 3, leaving Youtube as the only Google product I use with any frequency. "Google it" has become a pejorative to eff something up. Trips, you've been Googled.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

techntoke 7y ago

I noticed that Google has revamped Google Voice yet again after nearly killing it off entirely for Hangouts. Now it looks like they are planning on moving away from Hangouts for Google Voice interactions. Any news here?

lquist 7y ago

Honest question: Why does Google's experimentation with products get termed "killing" products vs Amazon/etc.'s gets framed as "experimentation"

scarface74 7y ago
What high profile product has Amazon killed - besides the Fire phone.
- notatoad 7y ago
  Is trips a high-profile product?

stcredzero 7y ago

Is there a "Google Deathwatch" website? Not one that can be easily googled, as of this moment.

angarg12 7y ago
Like this? https://gcemetery.co/ https://gcemetery.co/
- stcredzero 7y ago
  They killed Nest!? Nest did make some egregious mistakes, but still. The way Google is killing off stuff reminds me of Microsoft in the 90's touting, then killing APIs.
  - notatoad 7y ago
    Google did not kill off nest. They killed the "works with nest" API and replaced it with "works with Google Assistant".
    - stcredzero 7y ago
      So then they are literally touting, then killing off APIs.
      - notatoad 7y ago
        Your comment said they killed nest. That was incorrect.
        stcredzero 7y ago
        Yes. I based that off of one of the tombstones I saw on one of the sites, but that was hyperbolic.
jakub_g 7y ago
https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/

NN88 7y ago

just bring back the RSS Reader again FFS.

nkkollaw 7y ago

Google is becoming the new Yahoo! I don't get why they don't realize that by making people rely on all these experiments (see Inbox) and then shutting them down their brand suffers immensely. I've migrated all my photo collection to Photos--although I back it up regularly--and I'm seriously considering going back to Apple Photos. You just cannot trust Google to keep products working anymore.

oarsinsync 7y ago
> I've migrated all my photo collection to Photos--although I back it up regularly--and I'm seriously considering going back to Apple Photos I hope you either pay for storage or backup before you upload, or you may be disappointed to discover your photos are lower quality than they were when they were shot.
- nkkollaw 7y ago
  Yes, I pay. Good point, though. Although, I'm not sure my pictures would get downsized since their limits are pretty generous. The worst is videos. My phone shoots them at 4K and they would get resized at 1080p.

mikeokner 7y ago

Seems like as good a time as any to Show HN (or shamelessly plug my side-hustle, depending on how you look at it): https://www.naverator.com https://www.naverator.com It's a trip organizer/sharing platform that aims to be the place for you to collect all the various bits of information & reservations & such for your trip. Currently web-only but mobile on the roadmap as well as offline/export functionality which was one of the nice features of Google Trips. Feedback welcome. I know it's still a little rough around the edges. Hoping to have things buttoned up nicely in another week or two and then start advertising it more officially to everyday folks.

pkulak 7y ago
Sign up was a bit rough. Had to copy-paste a code from email (no link to click), then it just said I was confirmed and I could log in. Seems like it's pretty common for all of that to just be done through a single click on an email link. But do you even care if folks use a bogus email?
- mikeokner 7y ago
  It's all done through AWS Cognito so it's something I got working with the default code-based method and then moved on to other things. I'll look at reprioritizing a confirmation link to smooth that process. I do care somewhat about confirming accounts in general just because it cuts down on spam/abuse, and it ensures someone didn't fat-finger their email and then can't regain access when they forget their password in a month. Also, I have on the roadmap a feature for configurable reminders/notifications, and services like AWS SES track bounces. Too many invalid recipients and you run the risk of getting throttled or suspended.

oliyoung 7y ago

> "its good advice bt im Not sure uve had a startup before." [sic] > And this is spot on. Is it though? Amazon's Free tier is more than enough to run a small early/proof-of-concept startup. Even ignoring Docker etc, Elastic Beanstalk is literally set and forget platform. There's very little excuse for not running something fault tolerant and modern. At least, that's how I've stood up the last three startups i've lead engineering at.

lucideer 7y ago
Hoping this reply comes across neither offensive nor fawning, but... this comment seems like a pretty spot on example of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge
- oliyoung 7y ago
  It doesn't :) I understand your point, but with that level of technical detail in a post, claiming that "we're just a small startup so we built it ourself" and "you don't know because you've never worked in a startup" feels like .. I don't know .. an excuse?

frequentnapper 7y ago

it would be awesome if google travel would allow me to also see photos of each of my past trips in addition to all the travel details. They already live in Google Photos.

danols 7y ago

I have stopped investing time in cool/interesting Google consumer products that does not have a legit chance to reach at least 50%+ user penetration a long time ago. They are always doomed.

telltruth 7y ago

This is so eerily similar to killing of Picasa. They killed a great functional popular app and forced everyone to mediocre half assed website. Not sure what is going on at Google. Is there anyone in charge here?