Google Travel Eliminated Trip Summary Feature

25.08.2023 - 13:36 / skift.com / Dennis Schaal / Airlines

In a move to prioritize resources, Google Travel eliminated the feature that enabled Gmail users to view their past and upcoming trips, including everything from accommodations reservations to flights and things to do bookings, on google.com/travel.

This collection of travelers’ past and future trips, however, will still appear on Google Calendar.

“This year, we said bon voyage to the trip summary feature on google.com/travel,” Google said in a statement. “To keep you organized, travel reservations sent to your Gmail account will continue to appear on Google Calendar, as long as you have smart features and personalization turned on in your Gmail settings.”

The company intends to continue to focus on flights, hotels, vacation rentals, and experiences.

Google introduced the trip summary feature in 2019, and it was a mainstay of Google Travel, which today offers flights, things to do, hotels and vacation rentals. Google Travel visitors, if they were signed in to their Google accounts, for several months would have been able to see a notification that this itinerary aggregation feature would be discontinued. The end indeed came on May 1.

This was a nifty feature for some — if you didn’t mind Google having access to all of your travel plans, and trust Google that they don’t share the information. However, Google decided to eliminate the free feature in Google Travel because the number of people using it was too small to justify the resources needed to maintain or further develop it, according to a Google spokesperson.

In January, Google layed off 12,000 full-time employees, or around 6 percent of its workforce, but according to Google, these job cuts had nothing to do with the decision to scuttle the trip summary feature on Google Travel. Google made the decision to discontinue this itinerary collection feature in Google Travel sometime in 2022.

Google was able to collect travelers reservations by mining Gmail, which Google owns, for flight and hotel confirmations, for example. Google adds a module to confirmation emails in Gmail and until May 1 that module contained a link to your itinerary in Google Travel.

You can view the Google Travel module in the accompanying image above a JetBlue confirmation email.

The module had a link, View in Travel, which took users to their itineraries in Google Travel.

It makes for a confusing user experience because you might want to check in for your flight, but if you clicked on the View in Travel link above your confirmation email you’d end up on Google instead of the airline website, for example.

Google continues to stack these modules above Gmail users’ reservation confirmations from airlines, accommodations’ providers, and tour vendors, although these modules no