Travel Apps Battle for Tourist’s Soul: Tripl vs. Spotted by Locals

As part of my planning for a trip to an iconic European city in the fall, I’ve also been examining some travel apps. It’s peak tourist season and startups have been busily releasing new apps and upgrades. In short: it all comes down to whether you’re interested where friend Margaret found the best burger-and-fries in Paris or what local Henri says is le meilleur poulet roti in the 3rd arrondissement.

Spotted by Locals, Daily Secret, MyCityWay, and Makom fall in the expert-knowledge-is-best camp. On the other side is just about every social sharing app with some geo capabilities.

In this latter group, a startup called Tripl, just released their social travel app, and I think it’s representative of this app genre.

With Tripl, you do a Facebook login so that their backend can then search among your friends for geo-tagged posts. Tripl then assembles a very pretty story based on photos, status updates, and bits of travel factoids it has grabbed from the Intertubes. I suppose if I had Facebook friends who were more diligent in their Facebook book-keeping, I may have had a more compelling travel guide.

Instead, I learned based on one friends visit to Yankee Stadium that the Bronx is the northernmost of the five boroughs of New York City and it’s also known as Bronx County. Zzzzzzz. It sounds like a Wikipeida entry. In fact it is a Wikipedia entry.

The more interesting nugget about the origin of the name–one Jonas Bronck– is buried further down in the Wiki words. Of course, that would require a human editor using something called discernment to pull that out and expand on, rather than a programmer coding up an API to blindly scoop up the first chunk of Wiki text that’s found.

But I can see Tripl being a fun app if your friends are frequent travelers and post and are adventurous in their sight-seeing. The Tripl crew has also done some darn good Web work, and no doubt they’ll be more interesting features going forward.

Then there’s Spotted By Locals. This startup manages to utilize the talents of experienced locals who really understand the city they’re covering. I’ve already become dependent on their Paris collective of bloggers for off-the-beaten path bistros and cafes.

Here’s a snippet of a Parisian entry for 114 Fauborg, a pricey restaurant that has some good deals: “I ordered ‘King Crab’ Eggs with gingered mayonnaise, which was a total success, followed by the grilled sole perfectly cooked and, as dessert, an amazing ‘Fraisier’, which is a French cake with pastry cream and fresh strawberries. As always, in this kind of expensive restaurants, you can always eat for a much lower price when you come during lunchtime ..”

Tempting, no?

Spotted by Locals also has a credible mobile iPhone app that takes their reviews of restaurants and cultural sites and pins a marker on a Paris street map. Its “nearby” feature can then give you directions based on your current GPS coordinates.

It’s no secret the type of app I’ll be peeking at during my vacation. Nothing against the social travel genre, but it defeats travel’s purpose to experience something new by depending on the old gang for advice.

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