Suggested itinerary for a day tour of Amsterdam, the Netherlands

This morning, 151 Tips tried out Google City Tours, a new tool from Google Labs. While it’s still in beta (meaning Google is still working out some bugs), City Tours shows real promise as a new way to plan your activities in a city you’re visiting. In this short review, we present some suggestions for using it.

Vantage Travel and many other tour operators offer trip extensions, affording you the opportunity for a few nights’ extra stay in major destinations like Amsterdam, Budapest, or Jerusalem. In many cases these extensions are programmed just like the main itinerary of a trip, but you’ll also have opportunities for afternoons, mornings, or sometimes even whole days “at leisure.” If you’ve got some time on your hands during a trip extension, or if you’re just traveling on your own and want to plan your visit to a city, what’s the best approach? Guidebooks are an excellent source of detailed information on sights to see, but planning a day’s activities from a guidebook can take a bit of work. Google City Tours offers a new way to shorten that process.

Here’s how it works:

1. Visit http://citytours.googlelabs.com/ (you don’t need a Google account to use this service).
2. At the top of the screen is a field labeled, Enter a starting address for your tour. Type in the city and country you want to explore.
3. City Tours returns a map of the city in question with a proposed itinerary. It will try to find a cluster of sights and attractions that it thinks are realistic to visit within one day, mostly within walking distance of one another. (If you’ve used Google Maps before, this should look pretty familiar).
4. Too much for one day? No problem. Click on the “Add/Remove Sights” link toward the top of the screen. The map will change to show all of the sights as round, red buttons. Click on one, and a mini-window pops up. Click the “Remove” link, and the sight is taken out of your tour.
5. Best of all, City Tours lets you specify dates, and it tries to find attractions that will be open on the dates you specify. Use the “Change Dates” link (also toward the top of the screen) to modify your options here. (Warning: Because this service is still in beta, we strongly recommend checking your results against a good guidebook to make sure attractions are actually open on the dates you choose).

The "Change Dates" screen lets you search for sights that will be available during your tour.

The Verdict

City tours has a ways to go before it’s a perfect application. For some cities, such as Jerusalem and Bucharest, we found that it shows you a map, a list of attractions… but no street names! Still, the addresses for the attractions are there, so you can easily compare to a city map from a guidebook. For other cities, such as Amsterdam, Mumbai, and Chicago, it worked like a charm. At this stage, City Tours looks great for getting a suggested itinerary — but again, we do recommend checking the results you get against a guidebook. Google will no doubt work on improving this service over time, but despite the bugs, we’re already pretty impressed. Give it a try!