Facebook’s ‘City Guides’ is a tourist new companion

Like Google Trips, Facebook is launching a City Guide of its own with additional features that allow users to book their own hotel, restaurant or tour directly through the Facebook app.

The new feature is coming after a period of testing beginning from last year. The feature is being made available to a number of users on iOS platform.

City Guides provides users with lists of cities their friends have visited, along with recommendations on the places to go and things to do using Facebook’s already existing check-in feature.

Users can open the feature from the ‘More’ menu. Once they click into city tab, they are provided a list of friends who have visited the location along with the places they checked into while they were there. Users looking for suggestions can easily send a message or place a call to their friends to know more about the locations and their recommendation.

Down the page is a tab for ‘Places the Locals go’ that shows popular spots based on each location’s rating on Facebook.

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

The tool essentially wants to build on Facebook’s efforts to use users’ social graph to improve the relevance and value of recommendations. The Recommendations tool was released on Facebook last year in October to enable users to post a query and have it highlighted to their friends for advice.

Facebook is banking on the trust that exists between users and their friends that enable them take action on that basis. People are more inclined to act on a review from their friends than they would from review sites or marketing materials. If friends can provide improved contextual recommendation tools, it could compel users to come back to Facebook for such insights more often, boosting engagement.

In turn, it would inspire businesses and places of interest to increase their efforts to prompt more visitor check-ins and recommendations.