Google’s newest travel product, Touring Bird, helps you explore prices and options across travel providers and makes it easier to book tours, tickets, and activities in top destinations around the world.
For travelers looking for ideas, Touring Bird presents options by interest (like local eats, photo-worthy spots or kid-friendly activities) and offers curated recommendations from travel writers, locals, and destination experts.
Touring Bird was built within Area 120, Google’s internal incubator for experimental ideas. Area 120 was created to provide Google employees a place to pursue and test their promising ideas full-time, with dedicated support and resources. Through this program, the Touring Bird team set out to build a new tool that addresses the need for a centralized destination to plan your next vacation.
Touring Bird has announced that the product is successfully moving on from the experimental environment of Area 120 into Google, where the team will continue building as an official Google product.
Touring Bird’s beta product will be shut down on November 17, 2019, however, beta users can still access all their saved activities until that date.
The announcement comes on the heels of GetYourGuide’s $484 million Series E round of funding that valued the Berlin-based startup above the $1 billion mark. GetYourGuide is a popular marketplace for people to discover and book sightseeing tours, tickets for attractions and other experiences around the world.
Travel experiences (tours and other activities) is now a market sector estimated to be worth $150 billion this year and rising to $183 billion in 2020.