How to Create a Walking Tour with Google City Tours

Google recently launched Google City Tours in Google Labs. As mentioned here in labs, Google City tours helps you plan your city tours when you are on vacation in a major metropolitan area. You can specify the location of your hotel, and the length of your trip (1-5 days), and City Tours will map a detailed itinerary for you covering all the major attractions.

I used City Tours to plan a walking tour through Toronto, Canada. Here’s how I did it:

Planning a walking tour through Toronto

1. After going to citytours.googlelabs.com, I started by entering a starting address for my tour. I pretended to stay at the lovely Four Seasons hotel, on 21 Avenue Road.
2. I hit “Search”, and out popped a suggested tour.
3. However, to refine my City Tour, I used the “Change Dates” link to make my walking tour a one day trip.
4. Then, click on “Change”, and you will be brought back to your suggested tour.
5. My Toronto Tour included five stops for the day, and took me all across downtown Toronto. The suggested tour, without any changes I suggested to the attractions, looked like this:
6. Now, say you would like to include an attraction that is not on your list yet, go to “Add/remove sights”. I decided to add the CN Tower to the itinerary:
7. By clicking on “View schedule” again you are taken back to your itinerary. In my case, the CN Tower has been added and my new schedule looks like this:

Add as many attractions as you like, or remove some of the suggested ones. The map will automatically update with the new suggested tour.

I definitely plan to use Google City Tours to plan my next trip! Forget guidebooks, this is the most updated tourguide you can get!

Which city are you going to tour with Google City Tours? Let us know in the comments!