For a few years, Google Trips did something genuinely useful without being asked: it pulled flight and hotel confirmations straight out of Gmail and quietly assembled them into a clean day-by-day itinerary. When it shut down, that convenience went with it, and planning a multi-stop trip suddenly required more manual effort than we'd gotten used to.
What actually happened to it
Google folded the underlying features elsewhere rather than replacing the app outright. Gmail still automatically detects flight and hotel bookings and can surface them in Search and Maps, but the dedicated Trips interface — the single screen showing your whole itinerary at a glance — is gone. It's a case of a feature surviving while the product built around it didn't.
What we use instead: saved lists in Maps
For anywhere we're actually planning to visit — restaurants, viewpoints, trailheads — we lean heavily on Google Maps' saved lists feature now, creating a dedicated list per trip and dropping pins as we research. It's not a full itinerary tool, but it's genuinely good at the "where is everything relative to everything else" question that used to be Trips' quiet strength.
A shared document for the actual day-by-day plan
For the sequencing itself — what happens on which day — we've gone back to something closer to what we used before Trips existed: a simple shared document, broken into days, linking out to the relevant saved-list pins. It's less elegant than an auto-built itinerary, but it's flexible in ways an algorithm-assembled one never was, especially for a trip like our 10 days through Jordan, where the plan changed twice after arrival and a rigid app-generated itinerary would have just gotten in the way.
Where a dedicated app still earns its place
For longer, more complex routes — the kind of trip covered in our New Zealand South Island road trip — we do sometimes use a dedicated itinerary-planning app for the day-by-day driving schedule specifically, since juggling drive times, stop durations, and daylight hours by hand in a document gets tedious past a certain trip length. It's an extra tool rather than a full Trips replacement, but it covers the one piece a document genuinely struggles with.
Where the old habits still work best
For research-heavy trips like our week in the Masai Mara, we found the simplest system was still the best one: a saved list for camps and viewpoints, a document for the daily schedule, and Google's general trip-planning tools — including Google Travel for flight tracking and basic logistics — handling everything else. It's more manual than Trips used to be, but it's also more flexible for a trip that changes shape as you go.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Google Trips still available?
No — Google shut it down some years ago and folded its core features into Google Maps saved lists and Gmail's automatic trip detection instead.
What replaced Google Trips for itinerary planning?
There's no single direct replacement; most travelers now combine Google Maps lists, a shared document or spreadsheet, and a dedicated itinerary app for day-by-day planning.
Can I still see my old Google Trips itineraries?
Past trip data pulled from Gmail confirmations may still surface in Google Maps or Search, but the standalone Trips app and its saved itineraries are gone.
