My SFU pal Steve Ray tipped me to this little bit of travel goodness: you can now use Google to plan your city walking tour in Canada or further afield.

It’s free, fun and ridiculously simple: just plug in a starting address at citytours.googlelabs.com, select your dates and bingo–you’ve got the first draft of your tour complete with highlighted destinations, recommended length of stay at each site, and time to complete the walk.

A few more clicks and you can amend the tour to include–or remove–particular sites.

Prefer food to fashion? Music to museums? No problem. Just enter your preferred choices–or click on the options provided–and your tour is instantly updated. Import the map to your handheld and off you go!

I test-drove the service by entering starting addresses in cities I know well and was impressed with many of Google’s suggested itineraries.

Still, it’s not perfect yet: I concur with some of the criticisms in this Jetpacker post, especially the point that some of the walks seem unreasonably long.

It’ll never take the place of personal tours like the ones offered by TourGuys, of course. But with a bit more tweaking (imagine if Google included the transit information it already has with the tour itineraries?) it could do a real number on printed guidebooks…

Have you ever used Google to plan a walking tour? Do you plan to? Can you recommend it? Any tips or tricks?