Google Labs has introduced a new technology called Google City Tours which has gathered quite a bit of attention over the last few days, most likely because it’s Google doing the announcement rather than anything novel or inherently interesting in the product. Internet produce profiling site TechCrunch’s description seems sufficient:

Getting started is incredibly easy — just type in where you’re visiting (say, San Francisco or London), and Google will present a suggested itinerary spanning a three day trip, with around a dozen attractions per day depending on the city. From there you can change the number of days you’ll be staying (Google will show more attractions the longer you stay), and you can also manually adjust the list of places you’d like to visit. You can add a new attraction by entering its name in a text field, and Google will try to find it in its database. All attractions include a star rating, along with its hours operation and location.

My personal opinion is that this is a typical Google Labs product – without significant improvement, we will likely see this product fade from site fairly quickly. The core of the application is simply Day 1, I go to these locations in this order, Day 2 I go to (etc.). The interface is plain but still relatively non-intuitive, the routes do not take advantage of Google’s map route features, and the tours are relatively random. Bizarrely, there seems to be no way to actually link to a tour so that it can be mailed or shared with somewhere else, or even used on a different computer — every page is more or less http://citytours.googlelabs.com/.

There are other sites that provide not unsimilar ideas. Planet Eye has travel packs for exploration ideas. The awesome TripIt offers a personalized itinerary based on the data you feed it via e-mails or manual entry, though it’s missing the “what should I be doing” (as opposed “what am I doing”) component.

Todd Lucier says “Google is no threat to DMO’s and Visitor and Convention Bureaus” but notes that is shoes what DMO’s should be doing. I agree and in fact at some level this is what Discover Anywhere Mobile is trying to accomplish, though obviously we’re targeting more the mobile space.

What’s really going to be needed in the long run is some form of data portability between different sources of tourism information. Every person should be able to select a restaurant from TripAdvisor, an itinerary from TripIt, perhaps even information directly from a museum’s web page and then be able display it in a tool like Google City Tours or Bing Maps and also seamlessly view on their mobile phone. It’ll be exciting to see how this goes over the next few years.