Try Google City Tours to Enhance Your Traveling Experience

Google and Google Maps are much more than finding your way to and from destinations. Google City Tours will help you get the most out of your next trip by showing you the most popular points of interest (POI) and building an itinerary for you to visit those sites.

Google City Tours is still living in the Google Labs section of Google's website. If you enjoy the application or have recommendations to make it better, be sure to leave a comment here.

To get to the Google City Tours application manually just navigate to Google's home page, click on the "more" button and then the "even more" buttons on the menu in the upper left-hand corner. This will bring you go Google's "More Product Page" find and click on the "Labs" link.

Google Labs is where Google shows their latest and greatest applications that they are still developing and improving. Your comments and suggestions are a big part of Google's improvement process. On this page, find the link for City Tours. This takes you to a familiar Google Maps-like page. You can also click here to navigate to the Google City Tours page.

In the search bar, type in the name of a major city and click the Search button. Google will mark on the map and display a list of POIs for you. There are three links at the top of your itinerary that you can use to manage your tour. Click the Add/Remove Sights to modify your tour.

You can also navigate to individual points of interest by clicking on their links in the schedule window of the map page. Business hours, phone numbers, etc. can be found for each stop on your tour very easily. Additionally, the standard Google Maps buttons are on the top left-hand corner of the map, allowing the user to toggle between map, satellite, terrain and hybrid map modes.

As of this writing, Google has not placed a "Print" button on the search results page. There is no way to print your itinerary directly from Google. With a little effort, you can easily cut and past the itinerary to your favorite word processing program, including the map. This will probably be a feature added as the application develops further.

Google City Tours is another step in technology enabling us to easily find and easily navigate to interesting points of interest and other adventures while we travel. Application like this will soon be available for handheld devices, enabling the user to instantly create a tour of the city you have found yourself with some time off.