It seems for a while now that Google Trips has offered travel discounts for, well, virtually doing nothing.1 This feature has been around since 2017, but it appears to be one of those things that no one knows about.
Part of Google Trips' appeal is being able to condense everything from reservations to sightseeing in one cohesive place. Talk about one-stop shopping.
The discount feature isn't one that we were even aware about before but plan on utilizing a lot more. (It would even incline us to use Google Trips more often, as opposed to TripCase, TripIt or other like-minded app.)
The discounts are mostly centered around local activities. Current partners include Expedia, Peek, Urban Adventures, GetYourGuide and several other tour operators.
On a recent trip, though the GetYourGuide price was higher for things like museum activities, the Google Trips discount often made it cheaper than the museum. For instance, in Porto, Portugal, the official FC Porto museum and stadium tour cost €15 ($16.78). The final GetYourGuide cost was $13.83 (€12.36).
It would be great to see this extended to lodging and other travel operators, but hey, so far it seems like a good deal to us. Money is money.
Finding Discounts in the app
Google Trips pulls in its travel data based on a user's emails. Discounts are only offered for future trips, not past trips for the obvious reasons.
One quick workaround to get this feature to show up in the app is to quickly create a trip in the future to book an offer (in case a trip is not showing up). It will generally show up as a block under the large umbrella of a particular trip.
For a sample Boston trip, deals ranged from $20 off Expedia activities to 30% off Boston airport transfers with Holiday Taxis.
To see how this quickly worked, we selected 20% off a pretty reputable European-based tour booking platform GetYourGuide. To see if we actually received a discount, we selected a Boston 90-Minute Historic Sightseeing Cruise for $30.40 on the both the app and through the website.
Though it took a bit of finagling to get the dates right, the GetYourGuide deal in the app finally yielded a 20% off discount that was reflected on the checkout page.
The Google Trips discount yielded $6.08 off the normal price of $30.40, bringing the price down to $24.32.
The website offered us $30.40.
Seems kind of like a no-brainer to us.
