Three digital guidebook apps and what they offer visitors to cities around the world
Smartphone applications from Lonely Planet, Time Out and LiveTrekker aim to strike a happy medium between travel blogs and physical guidebooks
Are travel guidebooks history? Many travellers now rely solely on a phone for everything, happy to get their travel advice from TripAdvisor or Google and plot their route by GPS. A shrinking number would never leave home without a Lonely Planet or Rough Guide book. However, it’s now possible to strike a happy medium thanks to travel guide apps.
Where to go in 2018
While advice and itineraries can be gleaned from blogs, the latest guide apps offer a way to digitally tap into the expertise of a guidebook with the advantages of GPS and a web connection (though all three we tested also work well offline). We ran our eye over three digital guidebook apps for cities to see how they measure up.
1. Guides by Lonely Planet
Lonely Planet’s flagship app shows that the famous travel guide brand is moving with the times. It’s already possible to download its guidebooks digitally, but Guides is different. It’s primarily based around a map of the city you’ve chosen.
Once you’ve been given a tour of the city’s layout and transport links, various activities and attractions are divided up into coloured themes: see, eat, sleep, shop, drink and play. It’s reminiscent of the brand’s books, though much easier to navigate.
As you choose a theme, locations appear on the map, and each is clickable. A review, prices and web links lie behind each one, and there is a list of what’s nearby. Anything you like the look of can be saved to a favourites page, but there are also several curated collections of the best attractions, each on a theme (restaurants, fashion, history and so on).
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