Planning a trip is only the beginning. While TripAdvisor has provided airfare, hotel and restaurant tools through two apps, TripAdvisor and City Guides, travelers have had to turn to other sites to document their trips.
Recently, the granddaddy of travel sites added a suite of features to City Guides for Android, providing both check-ins and the ability to post photos.
Previously, the City Guides app was primarily an offline guide — you downloaded a guide with its maps, restaurants, hotels, places of interest and reviews, which were then available to read without an Internet connection. The update, adds online capabilities so that travelers can check in, take photos, add comments and then share their adventures with friends on Facebook, on-the-spot with an Internet connection.
And even without a connection — for example, if yo are travelling abour without cell service — the check-ins are stored and later synced when you go online, say back on your hotel Wi-Fi. Being able to store your check-ins for later use is what sets TripAdvisor's check-in feature apart from other check-in apps , Yenyi Fu, TripAdvisor's product manager, told TechNewsDaily. Travelers can also opt to share their check-ins to Facebook, the social network that the majority of TripAdvisor users choose to keep their friends and family updated, she said.
The app automatically creates a photo album for each trip. The photos are also stored to the phone's camera roll so travelers can easily import them to other sharing sites like Instagram.
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The suite of features, called Travel Journal, is available for all 50 worldwide destinations included in TripAdvisor's City Guides. The app is free from Google Play, and the company said it will release versions for iPhones and iPads later this fall.
While must-see places can be saved in TripAdvisor during the planning stages are automatically synced to City Guides, it would be useful to have a single TripAdvisor app that would combine the two in a single end-to-end solution.
