
This week’s dead Google product is Google Trips - rrreese
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/06/this-weeks-dead-google-product-is-google-trips-may-it-rest-in-peace/
======
crazygringo
> _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
The offline content component of Google Trips is the best part though.

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
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
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.

~~~
Faark
Somewhat better, maybe. It now allows me to download an area large enough to
fit my entire home town. Still doesn't allow an entire country or even more,
probably cause of bigger file size / more detail than the competitor i use.

But most importantly: It still requires me to sign into a google account to
download an area.

~~~
zymhan
Wow I missed that it requires you to sign in. I retract my statement that it
has gotten better. Google can go to hell with requiring a sign in for
everything.

------
dopylitty
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
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/)

~~~
hammock
>How much would people pay for a trips app?

TripIt Pro is the standard and costs $49 per year. It's not really for leisure
travel but for business/productivity.

~~~
dickeytk
I’m not sure why you say it’s for business. I do a lot of business and
personal travel and it’s great for both. Organizing trips with friends and
family is much easier to coordinate with tripit and my boss couldn’t care less
which hotel/flight I’m on.

The pro features specifically is mostly just alerting, not tied to
personal/business.

~~~
hammock
I have never used the sharing features much. I say business but perhaps what I
mean is frequent travel. I.e. having enough flights and hotels on your
calendar that they're hard (or at least a bear) to keep track of.

------
nneonneo
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
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).

~~~
morsch
Well, I can't:

    
    
      To see your trips and travel research, turn on these settings
    
      Web & app activity Off
    

Google Trips worked fine. The fact that Google adds more and more services to
try and convince me to turn this on[1] makes sure that I won't do so.

[1] Google Maps won't even let me store my _home address_ without also opting-
in; it worked fine without it for years.

~~~
ilikehurdles
I'm in your boat too. This is a completely dead and useless service to me if
it wants me to enable these settings.

------
libria
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.

~~~
evmar
[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).

~~~
pjc50
I think we have to question what "success" means here - all the complaints
come from people who were satisfied customers of something with a user base
that many startups would be happy to have. Is there no room for "not a world
takeover but still fundamentally OK" products?

~~~
evmar
I'm not sure Google has yet figured out how or why it wants to make such
products. I don't understand how apps like Trips or Reader get launched given
that they seemed destined for at most mild success, but one possibility is
that the people behind them at the time promised some sort of larger success
to motivate their funding.

True story: I worked on a small Google product where at one point our sales
team got a customer interested in a $1m contract, which was a decent amount of
money for the scale of our product. But the customer wanted some adjustment in
some of the wording. We couldn't get a Google lawyer to even look at the
result -- it wasn't worth their time for such a small amount of money -- and I
believe lost the customer as a result.

To your specific question, I think there is lots of room in the world for
fundamentally OK products -- but outside of Google. I love Pinboard for
example (well, I don't use it, but I'm rooting for him).

------
dgudkov
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
> 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?)

------
mikeokner
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
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
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.

------
pavel_lishin
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
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.

------
Scrantonicity
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
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.

------
toss1
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.

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

~~~
scarface74
What high profile product has Amazon killed - besides the Fire phone.

~~~
notatoad
Is trips a high-profile product?

------
parf02
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
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=s...](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)

Disclaimer: I work on a different travel-related product at Google.

------
Sujan
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.

------
danols
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.

------
oliyoung
> "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
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
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?

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

~~~
angarg12
Like this?

[https://gcemetery.co/](https://gcemetery.co/)

~~~
stcredzero
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
Google did not kill off nest. They killed the "works with nest" API and
replaced it with "works with Google Assistant".

~~~
stcredzero
So then they are literally touting, then killing off APIs.

~~~
notatoad
Your comment said they killed nest. That was incorrect.

~~~
stcredzero
Yes. I based that off of one of the tombstones I saw on one of the sites, but
that was hyperbolic.

------
client4
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.

------
BuckRogers
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.

------
myko
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.

------
nkkollaw
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
> 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
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.

------
ilamont
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.

~~~
izacus
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.

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

------
telltruth
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?

------
techntoke
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?

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

------
lawrenceyan
Doesn't look dead to me???
[https://www.google.com/travel](https://www.google.com/travel)

~~~
c0vfefe
It will expire in August.

------
kiwijamo
Does TripIt provide a similar function?

~~~
JOnAgain
TripIt basically died after acquisition. Hasn’t done anything new or
interesting in years.

~~~
jeromegv
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.

------
stunt
The best part is the title!

------
frequentnapper
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.

------
NN88
just bring back the RSS Reader again FFS.

------
ourmandave
That's a shame about Google Trips.

But on the plus side... oh.

