Facebook to add “City Guides”, a travel planning feature

Facebook is adding “City Guides” option in the ‘More’ menu.

The social networking giant is trying to become your travel planning app. The City Guides will show you a list of cities your friends have visited and recommend you the local places to visit or upcoming events in the area to attend.

When you click on a city or check in, you’ll see a row of rounded profile icons of your friends who have visited there. Tap on each one to see where your friends have been, such as hotels, offices, shopping malls, restaurants etc. A spokesperson said,

“We’re testing a redesigned surface on city Pages that showcases information about your city. This content already exists on Facebook, and during this test we’ll be centralizing it in a way that is more personalized and relevant to you. So, this new feature can help people get a better sense of their city, or a city they’re visiting through their friends’ eyes.”

The data is most probably extracted from users’ check-ins and Facebook posts. This feature will give users the ideas about what to do in a new city. Even if you don’t have such friends who travel much, the Guide also has an option of “Places the Locals Go” that shows a list of highly rated places in the area.

Each item has a bookmark icon to the right, which lets you save the place to a list of favorites. These bookmarked items will be available in a “Saved” section at the top of the city’s page.

Scrolling down the Guide, you will see a number of options such as Upcoming Events, Popular Attractions, etc. For now, this feature will be available with the information of major cities in a country and not the small towns and villages.

Facebook has been adding many new features lately such as built-in weather app, Job posting, the AI photo search, updated Trending section, multiple instant articles in one post, ability to go live from desktop and Stories.

The City Guides feature is under beta testing for now, hence limited availability.

Source: Techcrunch