I have just returned from my annual holiday on the hot and humid east coast of South Africa. As much as I love seeing family, eating delicious food, and even flying to an extent, I hate the management necessary to support my holiday fun. Before any vacation begins, you’ll find me buried in my phone, juggling multiple emails, boarding passes, restaurant reservations, and my list of attractions of interest. Adventure alone. The process gets very confusing, but it doesn’t have to be. Google can help with an all-encompassing Google Travel app.

There was a time when Google had a travel app in its toolkit. In 2016, it launched Trips, a smart travel agency that manages your errant digital travel gear. It was well ahead of its time, monitoring a variety of services including Gmail, transportation, accommodation and restaurant reservations. Users can manually add car rental information and other annotations for more personal items. Tours also goes beyond your email, offering sights and attractions in the cities you’re visiting without any prompting. This was especially helpful on my first trip to Berlin many years ago, when I didn’t know my brother and I.

However, as Google is wont to do, it shut down Trips in 2019 and failed to offer an alternative solution or replacement. Yes, Google does have a travel portal that serves as a broader search tool for accommodation, flights, points of interest and travel recommendations. However, it lacks some of the core features that make Trips useful. The portal is more of a tool for planning your vacation rather than minimizing management while you’re at it.

As I mentioned in the introduction, travelers often use a variety of tools to prepare for and enjoy their vacation. Information is scattered across these platforms, hidden in a continuous stream of clicks, swipes, screens and search results. Personally, I need Google Calendar for planning trips, Google Maps for viewing points of interest, Waze for road safety alerts, Google Flights for booking flights, Wallet for payments and passes, and Gmail for pretty much everything else. Others can save tickets and reservations in Drive, bookmark websites in Chrome, or create itineraries in Sheets. These are some incredible pieces. After an hour-long flight, the last thing I wanted to do was spend more energy looking for key booking details or itinerary for the next day.

The Google Travel app will combine the best of these services, allowing users to access all important information from one place and providing a gateway to other Google products. It’s not hard to do, and Google is no stranger to this arrangement. The workspace is the hub for accessing the company’s various office products. It is entirely reasonable for the travel center to provide similar functions for recording different information.

From this imaginary centralized application I imagine, I don’t need to search through Gmail to find subscription attachments. I also don’t have to check my calendar to see if I’m available on a certain day. Everything will be ready for me and accessible at any time. I can even get suggestions for nearby points of interest from the map. And, because Google has gotten so good at allowing users to collaborate on its platform, I’m better able to make plans with friends and family, save their basic details, and access this information on any device: watch, tablet , mobile phone or browser. This is my dream scenario.

While many users dislike adding social elements to apps that don’t specifically need them, the reviews and recommendations provided by users sparked my interest in new places, especially on the map. Google has since removed these features, especially public listings, but the Travel app would be a fitting new home for this information. Users can browse curated attractions created by reliable contributors to make vacation planning go smoother.

Organizing a trip to Rome? If you want to try local food but don’t know where to start, open the Travel app, browse some ready-made Google Maps public listings from within the Travel app, and start your journey from there. Instead, third-party services like Mapstr and Step: Your World offer alternatives, albeit paid and little-known ones.

Google also lacks a dedicated booking management app. While Google’s travel site includes all of these features, why not offer them in a standalone app on the device I’m likely to use during my vacation? Likewise, Google Maps offers a variety of accommodation booking options, but wouldn’t a travel app offer smarter options for this information? Bringing these items together under one umbrella application makes it easier to book and pay through Google. Even though Google wants me to, I won’t whip out my laptop just to search

On behalf of Google, I’d like to confirm the current list of products that fill this gap. I recently tried Wanderlog, but it wasn’t as seamless as I would have liked a travel app to be. A lot of manual commands are required; instead, I want an app to do the tedious work for me. Some features are also locked behind the pro version, which somewhat takes away from all the luster I have for the app. That said, a Wanderlog-inspired Google app really appealed to me.

Google has a clear niche to exploit. No other company has all the ingredients for a rich product offering to satisfy the appetite of organization-hungry travelers. For Google, there are also financial incentives. I’m more likely to use Google apps to organize my trip and reserve my bed and wheels than third-party options. The interconnectedness of Google products, including Wallet, My Email, and My Calendar, also played a role in my reasoning.

Seeds of great apps already exist, too. As much as I hate using Google’s online travel portal, there are some very useful features there. Detailed information on average accommodation prices, high and low season data and climate information are all brilliantly presented.

There’s also a huge room in my dream Google Travel app for a Gemini-powered vacation drafting tool to keep up with trends. I often use AI as a wireframe for road trips, driving distances, and schedules. It’s much easier to use natural language to describe the general flow of my potential trip than it is to do a two-step process between Google Maps and search, so it only makes sense for it to be an important part of the trip planning and management experience.

While I don’t think you should hold your breath waiting for a resurgence in travel, Google should do more to make travel viable for its users. It’s been a long time since I’ve been excited about a useful Google product. Gemini Live is “cool,” but it’s not an integral part of my daily life. A travel app is. If we had the Google Travel app, I would be the first one on the bus. Will you be the second?