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.

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I think I found a great mix of interesting and helpful mashups. Some give you information prior to visiting a country, help you evaluate hotels, show you traveling routes and give you insights on what is being written in the local press. I did include two environmental mashups that simulate sea level risings and one that displays carbon emissions of your next flight.

1. Trivop Hotel Video Guide

I think that a Hotel Video Guide is an excellent idea for a Google Mashup. All hotels are placed on a world map, most of them in Europe, and you see the exact location of the hotel on the map. Clicking on a country or town will load the hotels in it displaying their position on the map.

Clicking on a hotel will load the video review which normally consists of several different videos showing the interior and exterior of the hotel. This is great for getting a first overview of how it all looks like. It is also possible to filter the hotels by location, price and star rating.

Trivop

2. Everytrail – GPS maps and routes

Everytrail lets its users upload gps data and photos mashing them up with Google maps and making them available to everyone in the community. This is another excellent opportunity to get impressions of a certain area before you make your way to it. I especially like the visualization of the tours.

Everytrail

3. Terrapass – Calculate CO2 Emissions

The first of the two environmental mashups that I like. This simply calculates the CO2 emission of a flight that you enter displaying the results afterwards. Entering a city will automatically display the list of available airports which is nice if a city has more than one.

Terrapass

4. Floodmaps

Floodmaps

With talk about sea level rising it is important to get a visual idea of what would happen if the sea level would rise for a certain amount of meters. Floodmaps simulates this by dynamically changing the map.

Floodmaps

5. Outside.in

Read local news of more than 3500 towns in the United States. The mashup presents a Google map with all towns available loading local news at soon as a town is left-clicked.

Outside.in

6. Earth Album

A Google Maps, Flickr and Youtube mashup. Selecting a country on the map displays images tagged with the country name in a thumbnail bar. Clicking on the thumbnail loads the image in a higher resolution.

It is possible to narrow down search results by looking specifically for castles, mountains, citys and food or use a custom keyword like a location that you would like to see.

Earth Album

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Clicking on an incident opens a detailed page displaying a closer map of the region and an article explaining what happened. A source is also always given at the end of the article. The main page lists lots of additional information below the map. The newest 30 incidents are displayed and all incidents are also sorted after what kind of incident happened. (Airport / Aviation Incidents to Terrorist Arrests)

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