TouristEye - Travel Guide 4.0.7

Having a written itinerary when visiting a foreign city is a good thing. It gives a structure and keeps you motivated to go further instead of buying a bunch of fries with sauce and slack around on a bench in Amsterdam; Unless that's what you want to do in the first place.

TouristEye works as an itinerary notebook, but also as a digital luggage stamp collection. The cool thing is that it is community based.

There's nothing here about booking hotels or checking air travel fares. You simply get to explore cities that you might want to visit and contribute to the community by adding in new cities and new places in those cities. Points of interest are simply categorized as "Things to do" (i.e. Activities) or "Where to Eat" (i.e. Anything that costs money and goes into your stomach or lungs).

Organizing a trip is made by selecting cities and places to visit. Once you actually do it, you can check them as visited, making them part of your Passport record. Until then you can easily put them in a wish list in which other users can contribute. Oh yeah, since there's user generated content, people can follow others and receive updates.

Herein lies the caveat. Being that the entire database is created by the users themselves, means that a fairly objective information system is under the precipice of subjectivity. Cities may have multiple entries for example. Also, customization is almost nonexistent. Filtering for a place to eat is a guessing game, since categories that do not exist in the menu, so to speak are not removed from the search list. Essentially, there's a lack of police work from behalf of the developer which can be either because the product is still in development, or they simply ignore it (which is frankly more likely since the release was barely over a year ago).

Features

• City and attraction profiles
• User generated content
• Passport - travel record
• Directions map
• Offline access

Pros

Quite helpful for discovering things that may be off the beaten path, or to advertise places that deserve more attention ahem...

Cons

Lack of content maintenance.

Conclusion

TouristEye fills an interesting niche of the travel digital support genre of apps. It can yield real surprises and be very useful for some quick planning, but in the end, it feels a bit unfinished.