Travel media company Lonely Planet has announced the release of Guides on iOS and Android. The city guide app was designed to help users plan trips and learn about worldwide destinations, and has launched with content covering 38 cities, including London, New York, Paris and Rome.
The Guides app includes an average of 1,000 points of interest for each city, and allows users to download individual city guides and access offline maps for these locations. Users can browse points of interest based on categories including ‘see,’ ‘eat’ and ‘sleep,’ among others, and can also browse lists of curated content based on themes. For instance, when browsing San Francisco’s city guide, users can view a list of free activities or attractions, as well as a list of locations featured in films, and so on.
Users can browse a city’s map to find attractions in a particular neighborhood, and can also browse attractions based on their current location. In addition, the app provides an overview of each city, as well as tips for planning a trip on various budgets.
Each attraction includes a description, hours of operation, address, contact information and more (all where applicable). Users can save individual locations as favorites within the app, and to their Lonely Planet account.
In a statement, Daniel Houghton, CEO of Lonely Planet, commented:
We are very excited to launch Guides for mobile. We were one of the first travel publishers ever to have content available in the App Store and were a launch partner for the iPad. We have taken the time to understand what travelers need and expect from a mobile product in 2016. Guides delivers Lonely Planet’s expertly-curated content in a format that is contextual and intuitive on mobile devices and which utilizes the many great innovations of those platforms to deliver the best possible user experience.
Guides is available to download for free on the iTunes App Store and Google Play.