The Google City Tours online application provides an interesting alternative to traditional ways of exploring a city with the help of travel guides or guided tours. It is basically a Google Maps application that provides three day tours for many of the world’s most popular cities. All the user needs to do is to enter the name of a city and the country. Google City Tours will then display information about the sights in the left sidebar and a visual representation on Google Maps on the right.
Each tour is taking the day the sights are visited into account to include anniversaries and festivals that might take place at one of the days of the tour. The tour overview on the left side will list the name of the sights and the traveling time between sites (only walking time, might be a good idea to check for other means of transportation).
The tour is displayed on Google Maps with the usual options of zooming in and out of the map and printing parts of it.
One interesting option provided by Google City Tours is the ability to add or remove sights from the tour. This is extremely useful if a sight is not listed in the default tour. It can also be handy to remove sights that are of no interest to the individual or group. The Google Maps service will calculate the new tour. It is even possible to remove all sights and plan a tour individually.
Google City Tours is an excellent online tool that aids individuals and groups plan city tours.
Update: Google City Tours has been discontinued and is no longer available.
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Tons of commercial destinations… :S Here in Spain are many hotels included as touristic ones… Hope in the future the users can “suggest” most-popular places to go and then make the google bots refine the walking tours. :)
That’s where the custom tours come into play. You can remove destinations and add some that you would like to see.
Who knows that there is a city in France called “Tours” ? I do, since this is where I live :)
- Hey! Martha, Google is talkin’ about our dear town!
- Georges, that’s tours like circuits, not like our town, you old fool!
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Yeps, Google Tours is fine, Paris and London are nicely fitted.