Version 9.8 of Google Maps for Android didn’t exactly make the national news headlines earlier this month — and rightly so — but there are a couple of new features worth flagging up for you to make use of.
One is the ability to access your upcoming travel plans (pulled from Gmail and Google Calendar) more easily.
Tap the search box and enter my events
to see upcoming travel plans like hotel bookings, reserved flights and more. You can narrow down the search by using my flights
or my hotels
and of course you can run the same searches using voice input if you want to give your fingers a rest. The first relevant result is plotted on the map with the subsequent entries listed underneath.
Select an individual hotel or airport and your upcoming travel plans are shown in the details card. If you don’t want this to happen — perhaps to hide a surprise anniversary trip from your better half if he or she has a habit of picking your phone up — then tap on the three dots to the side of the personalised information and choose Hide this reservation.