Get your walk on with the new and improved Google City Tours

I knew Google Maps was a great tool for finding directions, and I figured it would be useful to any tourist, but I didn't know Google had actually built a tour planner. It's called Google City Tours, and it just got a huge upgrade that makes it worth checking out.

Google City Tours takes your list of destinations and provides an optimized plan for you to see all of them. It even does a pretty good job of knowing when the places you want to visit are actually open.

The best new feature in City Tours is detailed walking directions. Google Maps has been able to spit out decent walking routes for some time now, and adding it to your tour plan makes more sense than estimating your walking time based only on point-to-point distance. You can also now import a custom Google Map into Tours, which allows you to pick your own destinations quickly -- instead of going with Google's suggested landmarks.

Google City Tours is still in Labs, which means it's not quite finished. The interface is already a lot more like what you're used to from Google Maps, though, which makes it easy to jump right in and start playing around. For an idea of what a finished tour looks like, you can scope out Google's walking tour of New York City bookshops.

[via The Next Web]

Tags: city, google, google city tour, GoogleCityTour, maps, planning, tour, trip