New York — Continuing its goal of expanding its travel-related features, Microsoft’s Bing, this time rolled out new “Attractions Pages”, featuring museums, tourists spots and other activities, in tandem with partners TripAdvisor, Frommers, WCities and Zvents.
The newly released Attractions feature is designed to bring together a number of bits of information related to specific tourist attractions for any given location.
In addition, the attractions pages delivers results from some 52,000 attractions around the globe, furnishing addresses, website details and phone information, as well as star rating system, all in one page. They also provide things like related images and videos, maps, hours of operation, upcoming events, reviews, directions, nearby restaurants and parking, etc.
Attractions joins Events as a detailed vertical under Destinations when searching on, say, a city like San Francisco or London, UK:
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“To ensure you have most recent information, we are teaming closely with leading content providers including Frommers, TripAdvisor, WCities and Zvents,” Bing says in a blog post on the new pages.
For instance, TripAdvisor presents review segment and WCities delivers attractions data about the Seattle Aquarium.
Searching on attractions for a city displays a list of selected attractions, for which you can then dive a bit deeper. For example, say you are traveling to Lexington, KY, and if you want to see some ideas about what to do while you are there, you can search using the Attractions tab and find places like Keeneland, or the Maker’s Mark Distillery, one of several nearby bourbon distilleries.
Moreover, our formal interaction with “Attractions” is that once established, it can indeed be helpful in quickly presenting some of the most relevant information on destination attractions. The Attractions page features, as many of the Bing vertical pages do, filters on the left hand side to narrow down your searches, say to museums, or by neighborhood, etc.
Interestingly, Bing continues to expand the filtering features, as well, and one of our readers noted that “Narrow by Date” has recently been added as a filtering option for some searches. Making it a bit more universal and discoverable we are sure will come with time and a few tweaks, but it is well worth having in search results.
No wonder then that travel is clearly one of Bing’s prime focuses (a major reason why Bing joined the FairSearch Coalition to push for the blocking of Google’s ITA Software acquisition, no doubt). Other recent travel-related alliance made by Bing include a flight search partnership with KAYAK, the insertion of flight price suggestions in the search box, and destination pages for cities (which are somewhat similar to the new Attractions pages).
Nevertheless, Bing’s foray into this arena coincides with heightened interest in attractions and tours these days and their online distribution.
As Stefan Weitz says in the video accompanying the blog post, Bing is continuing to “deliver structured information in a way that helps you make a decision,” as it continues to move beyond 10 blue links.
Video: Bing Feature Update: Check out top city attractions before you go