Tag: Travel »

It's getting to that time of year where many of us choose to go on holiday and explore new cities and surroundings. Wandering around aimlessly is all well and good but it's nice to have some structure to a trip. This is where TripAdvisor City Guides hopes to help.

The new app offers a guide of all the best restaurants, attractions, hotels and other sights for 20 different cities. There's plenty of variety with 9 cities in North America covered: Boston, Chicago, Hawaii, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York City, Orlando, San Francisco and Washington D.C. European cities such as Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Florence, London, Paris and Rome are catered for as well, plus three Asian cities and Sydney, Australia.

The app works offline so there's no fear of expensive data roaming bills, and thousands of user reviews are available along with self-guided tours created by TripAdvisor members and destination experts.

TripAdvisor City Guides is available now and it's that perfect price point of free.

Fotopedia’s mission has always been to create a photographer and user-friendly Wikipedia for photography. Their iOS apps take a category and compile the best shots in a wonderful package. Their latest offering, Women of the World, a collection by Olivier Mantel, is free and “A tribute to the diversity, beauty and strength of women around the world."

A joint project with the World Bank, the photos celebrate the indomitable strength of women all over our planet with hundreds of extraordinary images and a small selection of photo-stories that showcase women in traditional and decidedly modern roles. From a mosque in Senegal to a road works project in Vietnam and even on to Wall Street, the collection spans 35 years of women at home, at work, and on the go in moments of joy, contemplation, toil, and sorrow, but often doing everyday things in everyday settings, too.

The stories are updated: at present they focus on the “Women of Africa," “Eternal Mothers," and just added, "Forever Yours" - a look at marriage.

Like all Fotopedia apps, the interface is simple to use and the images sharp and striking. There are also lots of sharing options built in to help bring attention to, as World Bank president Robert B. Zoelick so aptly puts it in the app’s forward, “women [who] make up 50% of the global population, 40% of the global workforce, yet … own only 1% of the world’s wealth.”

Download this visual treasure trove and celebrate the world's mothers, sisters, daughters, wives, friends, colleagues and inspirations.

57 years after Walt Disney first opened the gates to Disneyland in Anaheim, California, would-be visitors to Sleeping Beauty’s castle no longer have to travel to see the magic. Now there’s an app for that. OK, not really, very little beats the look in a child’s eyes when they first meet Mickey or a favorite princess on Main Street. But for those planning a trip, or those for whom one is still in the amorphous future, the folks at Disney have "Imagineered" an app: Disneyland Explorer for iPad. It takes virtual visitors on a pretty extensive tour of the entire California Disney experience.

Families can use a standard navigation menu, or simply swipe through the two parks – Disneyland and it’s younger sibling Disney California Adventure - to discover not just the rides, but also the restaurants, nightlife, shopping and hotels. There are 100 “touch points” in the app - that is 100 things to find and tap. Many just describe the associated attraction, but others offer photographs, short videos, and a few toggle some interactive treats kids will enjoy including a chance to choreograph a fireworks show or ride up - and then plummeting down - the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror.

This “happiest app on earth” is free to download and while its primary purpose is to get us calling our travel agents and packing our bags, as souvenir, wish, or a peek at what’s changed in oh, say, 35 years, it’s admirable as a stand-alone product. As always when Imagineers get behind a project, the presentation is slick, seamless, and will leave tourists past and future wanting more.

American Express has launched an app for members and subscribers to their magazine, Departures, to help them find the best shopping, eating, drinking, and hotels in a variety of cities around the world with Departures Ultimate City Guides.

While there are plenty of apps for finding just those things in cities around the globe, this app clearly caters to more of a “high roller” crowd than those other apps. The magazine Departures is only available for Platinum and Centurion card members of American Express. Loosely translated, that means that this magazine and this app is for those that make a lot of money only. Getting a Platinum card apparently requires a six-figure income minimum. The Centurion card is available by invitation only, requires $150,000 of annual spending with American Express, and has a $2500/year membership fee, but it does come with a personal concierge service. Oh, and the card is made of titanium. The magazine also has content focused on issues of the 99% such as: plastic surgery addiction, custom clothing for men, and all kinds of articles on world travel.

This is an app for those who are looking for a higher class of digital travel guide, one that will not point out all the hotels around them, but the five-star hotels. This is for finding restaurants where the gratuity would likely feed a middle-class family of five for a week. This is for finding lounges where the cost of a bottle of wine would let a college student party for a full four years.

Note that while the app is free to download, to enter it, it requires an authentication code from an issue of the Departures magazine, which again, is only for those high-earning Platinum and Centurion cardholders with American Express. The app is universal, as having to download two separate versions of an app is just so upper-middle-class.

Regular users of public transport know that it's a bit of a maze to navigate through. It's all too easy to stick with the tried and tested routes while still not really knowing anything else about travelling around a city. HopStop sets out to help in such matters by offering detailed public transit, walking, taxi and biking directions for dozens of cities throughout the US, Canada and Europe.

A free app, HopStop offers directions from the user's current location, the ability to find nearby subway stations or bus stops along with estimates for taxi costs ensuring there are plenty of options.

High quality transit maps are available for NYC, LIRR, Metro North and San Francisco, with updates for NYC transit advisory services. Further biking directions are available for cities such as NYC, Washington DC, Chicago and San Francisco.

For the disabled users, it's easy to see what services are wheelchair accessible, plus calorie consumption and carbon emissions are calculated for the health and environment conscious.

HopStop is out now and set to solve everyone's travelling woes in both new and familiar cities.

Car Trip is an inexpensive app that helps users while driving. It keeps track of the exact distance till the destination as well as plans the most advantageous route to take to get there.

For the fuel conscious, it also calculates how much fuel is required and how much it'll cost the driver, according to the average speed of the car. It might be a feature already available on some cars but for those of us with older cars, it's an extremely useful concept for long trips.

The app is laid out in a simple manner and even keeps track of the next five days of weather reports which is useful for planning ahead.

For the planning obsessive who's working on a budget, Car Trip is an ideal way to organize an all important long distance trip.

It's out now, currently priced at $0.99, before returning to its original price of $1.99 soon.

MyCityWay has a new app designed to help visitors find their way around their latest destination, or even their current one. MyCityWay USA offers information on restaurants, bars, hotels, shopping, tourist attractions, and more. Users choose the city which they want to view, from over 50 cities across the US offered in the app, a short information download initiates, and hten a variety of info on various types of places can be pulled up based on type. Location and phone info are offered, with the ability to call the place directly, view it on a map, and get directions to it. Restaurants that support OpenTable for reservations can be accessed through the app as well. Locations can be added to a list of favorites in the app, shared on Evernote, or added to contacts.

MyCityWay USA is not just for visitors – residents of cities. can use the app to find places that might be more appropriate to them, such as grocery stores, laundromats, and Craigslist listings. Of course, the two key essentials can be found in both app views: restrooms and wifi. Jobs also appears in both views - in case that vacation destination should turn into a new home. MyCityWay USA is available as a free download.

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When most people think live plays they immediately think Broadway: the Great White Way. Maybe they even think off-Broadway if they are adventurous. But real theatre lovers - of musicals, dramas, fresh originals and truly timeless classics - London’s West End is, in this Theatrephile opinion anyway, where the best live action lives. And, yes Agatha’s Christie’s longest running play ever The Moustetrap is still booking in 2012.

Now there’s an app for lucky local London culture seekers, travellers and even those of us who just want to admire from afar. London Theatre is a universal, cross-platform mobile guide to The West End. It’s also a ticket agent for LastMinuteTheatreTickets.com. The app also has info and tix for special events and all sorts of cultural fare from opera to dance to concert listings.

For everyone the app offers news, lucid reviews and cast interviews from the website’s blog. For each theatre address users can even get GPS guidance – ideal for those planning on a New Year theatre junket across the pond.

Condé Nast Traveller apps were previously available for New York, Barcelona, Paris and Rome visitors but it's now been extended to London. I'm biased but London is a fantastic city to visit with hundreds upon hundreds of fascinating sights to explore so for the grand price of nothing, London: Condé Nast Traveller City Guide goes some way to helping travellers to the city learn where to go for the must see parts of London.

This is done through its quarterly updates by editors who offer the best inside knowledge as well as word-of-mouth recommendations from the locals.

London: Condé Nast Traveller City Guide comes with over 500 fully searchable listings, encompassing Food & Drink, where best to stay, shopping locations, things to see & do and what's worth checking out as part of the nightlife. GPS capabilities, offline maps and augmented reality functionality all makes it easy to explore and find the places within London.

Besides that, there are audio tours of the editors' favorite places, and a To Do list and travel journal for the ever organized traveller.

London: Condé Nast Traveller City Guide is available now for free.

The arrival of iOS5 has meant that many app developers have had to update their products to work with the new operating system. Fortunately many, like TomTom, have used that opportunity to improve upon an already successful app.

TomTom 1.9 offers numerous changes, most notably optimization for the iPad at last.

iPad optimization means that TomTom now offers a full-screen display which promises the ability to see the driving view at the same time as the Advanced Lane Guidance images that we've all come to appreciate from the product. Ultimately, it's all down to space and who can resist the saying 'bigger is better' in this case? More room to see what's going on has to be good for drivers as they keep an eye on the road as well as their TomTom app.

The interface for both iPhone and iPad users has been updated and improved upon, ensuring that TomTom is quicker than ever to use. Driving view can be checked with just one touch from anywhere with guidance options similarly easy to check out. Even switching between different route types takes mere moments thanks to the improvements made to the app.

As we've all come to expect from TomTom, maps have also been updated to take into account any road changes in recent times.

TomTom users may have also found that they had trouble with their existing subscription to TomTom HD Traffic before this update. Fortunately for them, to make up for the inconvenience TomTom will be extending their subscription by 30 days as way of compensation. Hurrah!

One bad piece of news for anyone still using an iPhone 3G however, this is the last update of TomTom that will fully support the device. Future updates can be downloaded for any iPhone 3G users but the new features won't be available. Maybe this is the ideal time to upgrade to a shiny new 4S?

The latest version of TomTom is available now.

Gogobot, the useful social-networking travel website, has just released Gogobot, a useful social-networking iPhone app. It's less confusing than it sounds. Trust me.

The website allows users to chronicle their travels throughout the world and post questions for recommendations on where to eat, stay, etc... Other users can then make their own recommendations, which are automatically linked to database entries with images, addresses and contact information. The app allows users to access their trip plans, check for recommendations, write up their own reviews for a location on-the-spot and even create their own digital postcards to commemorate their travels. The only feature that really seems absent is the ability to post recommendations for other users, but on-the-spot reviews will be saved to their account to be used later if need be.

Given the sheer amount of useful applications, the whole "make a postcard" thing seems almost quaint by comparison. That's not to say it's not a neat idea, though. I can imagine it would save a lot on postage. Additionally, their look can be customized somewhat, and who doesn't enjoy creating nifty looking photo-things to send to friends and family?

Anyone who travels or plans to do any traveling should take a look at Gogobot. It's totally free, and it's in the App Store right now.

Itchy feet? I know the feeling well and it's not because of poor personal hygiene. Sometimes it's just nice to get away from it all and discover new lands and cultures. It's not always as simple as that though which gives an app like TripColor a dual purpose.

For those unable to travel, it's an app that enables users to browse the blogs of people already on their journeys. Glorious photos can be added to keep everything about the app attractive to look at while a location function means it's easy to see the path a traveller has taken. Users can browse a variety of different travel blogs but the real benefit stems from keeping track of a friend or family member who's going on a trip of a lifetime.

That's where the other purpose comes into play. For the user who's planning a journey away, not only can they show others their journey but they can keep a diary of all their adventures to look back on at a later date. It's a pretty neat idea and clearly more fun than using an all purpose blogging tool, with the added benefit of being able to blog without an internet connection.

At the grand price of nothing, this is surely the ideal time to give a different kind of social blogging app a try?