OK, maybe planning is a bit misleading term here. By 'planning' I don't mean booking your flights, keeping track of booking references and other housekeeping stuff (services like TripIt do fantastic job in this area).
By planning, I mean more like 'How do you know where to go? How do you discover places worth visiting? How do you collect and keep information about them?'
The truth is, most people don't plan at all. This is why you still see people roaming through cities waving booklets and paper maps, while at the same time their smartphones rest in their pockets.
In fact, when asked about planning, most people will say something like "Planning? Nah, it's just too much of a hassle".
While there is no lack of travel apps available in the App Store, most of them simply take the ancient (and I do mean ancient) concept of a travel guide and put it in a digital form (yes, yes, there are videos and animations and some really nicely designed apps) but all in all, it's the same millennium-old concept, made digital.
Meet Triply -- the travel planning app we have been working on in the last 4 months.
The idea behind it is really simple: "Make planning a trip so quick, seamless and easy, that people won't even notice they create a trip plan".
It really works like magic -- you simply tell Triply the name of the city you're going to visit:
You will instantly see the most interesting places in this city (notice how we show you the most relevant ones so you are not overwhelmed with 3,675 things to do in London as in some other apps):
You can easily filter by category:
And you can specify a certain area of the city:
So with this simple interface you can do pretty powerful filtering like 'I want to see all the bars in the area of my hotel'.
Creating a trip plan is as simple as tapping 'Add to Trip' button. From your perspective, this is a 0.5 seconds job.
Behind the scenes, Triply will do some really heavy lifting without you even noticing.
Triply will find and download information from services like Foursquare, Google Maps, Google Places and Wikipedia, will structure it in a beautiful way and will store it safely on your iPhone.
Within seconds, and with minimal input from you, you will have beautifully organized trip plan.
I have been using this app a lot in the last few months. Obviously, I am heavily biased, but I can say it is one of the best apps in its category.
- It utilizes the most powerful APIs available on the Internet today;
- It has access to the World's most complete venue and places database (Foursquare's);
- It is simple, lightweight and fast;
- The ease of use is simply unmatched -- you can create a trip plan while waiting to board your plane or while enjoying a couple of WiFi minutes, sipping your coffee at Starbucks.
I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I do.
Triply is a free download on the AppStore.
