Oui, you can still have an amazing vacation without constantly conferring with the digital equivalent of Passepartout on your Droid or iPhone. If the city is Paris with its user-friendly infrastructure, then you really don’t need to peer down at say MyCityWay’s Paris app to find the nearest Bureau de Poste. At least that’s what I found out on my recent holiday abroad.
Before leaving, I had reviewed a few travel apps–MyCityWay, Spotted By Locals, and GuidePal–with the ultimate goal of doing actual field work with them. Anyway, I made the pleasant discovery that I didn’t really need all this travelware.
In Paris, for example, there are an incredible number of old-school physical maps strategically positioned on the rues and boulevards, where they effortlessly direct you to Metro stations, key building, as well as post offices. Not every city is blessed like Paris. Even so, it’s always a great travel experience to interact with the local humanoid forms by asking them for help.
True there were a few instances where MyCityWay’s highly practical My Paris app would have been helpful. Unfortunately, they wasn’t an Android version for my HTC Droid phone. Didn’t matter, though. I soon found out there are some great freebie apps on Google Play to navigate me through the Metro system–check out this one in particular.
Back at our room, I was using my iPad to page through the great content of less sexy, clunkier, but still wonderful TripAdvisor. All those GPS and directions features that travel startups crow about were just not that helpful. With TripAdvisor, you just need to know the name of your current arrondisement to find good nearby restaurants that had been vetted by the crowd. And the TripAdvisor community is an active one–posting comments and criticisms to Parisian spots during our brief visit.
I shouldn’t be too hard on some of these apps. Spotted by Locals had more interesting bistro and brasserie suggestions than the others. But there were two less appreciated mobile apps that deserve special mention. The Fork–or La Fourchette when you’re in La France–is a restaurant site (and app) with rich and creative dining choices. The IOS version helped us overcome some awkward phone calls–I speak Franglais, not French–through its neat online reservation system.
And legendary foodie Patricia Wells has a terrific app, The Food Lovers Guide to Paris, for Apple gadgets, which condensea her food wisdom into lists of restaurants, cafes, bars, and food markets by arrondissement.
Sorry MyCityWay, GuidePal and others: great content, especially written by knowledgeable reviewers, trumps features.