Farewell Google Trips

Google is in many ways a love-hate relationship. It is hard not to be loved for what it brings. But the hate ingredient pops up every now and then and most commonly when Google takes away what it was offering to its users for a long time.

After so many years Inbox is now going away. I would not cry for it as Gmail will still be around,  but I will be crying over one feature of Inbox that I was using the most: Trips.

I agree I travel more than an average person, but can imagine I have not been the only one using Trips. My entire life of preparing for a trip (booking flights and stays), going for a trip (figuring out my next flight or hotel) and reporting expenses (I was categorizing each receipt like Uber with a particular trip tag) made my life-0in-transit well organized.

But that was the past. And now I am back to manually bucketing all trip-related emails from United, Expedia, Uber, AirBnB and others. Google even went and deleted the February trips I already had. My last one visible is from January, 2019. That is bad... And what is worse, there are no signs of that feature being recreated in Gmail. The Google Trips app does not show my February trips either and new bookings for March and beyond do not get any automatic tags they used to...

So it looks like it is game over for Trips. :'( :'( :'(

The bottom line is you must be careful about your relationship with Google. It may be love and joy while it lasts but then there are no guarantees and you may be left out in the cold. This is, by the way. influencing decisions like developing apps for Google cloud. If you can't be sure the APIs and services are guaranteed to stay, you may want to select another cloud provider.