When you’re on vacation in a strange city, wouldn’t it be great to have a tour guide, someone who can lead you to the best sights to see while you’re there? Enter VadoVia, the crowdsourced travel app created for travelers, by travelers.
Overview
VadoVia is a travel app that provides crowdsourced information about the city, state or country you’re visiting. VadoVia is an unusual travel app in that the information provided by the app has been entered by other users who have visited the area. The information in the app is as up to date as when a user last visited that location.
VadoVia provides information about places to go and things to see, all supplied by previous visitors. Users of the app can create “tours” and save them for use by others. Tours can include photos, maps, and descriptions of the attractions available for a specific area. Also included are the best places to eat, hotspots for entertainment, and other types of attractions.
Walking, biking, or driving, the app can tailor its directions to your mode of transportation.
As you use the app, you can create your own tours for other users to access later. You can create your own photos and videos to add to your tours via the iPad’s built-in camera, and even perform edits on the photos before uploading them for use in your tours. Photo tools include the ability to crop, adjust brightness and contrast, saturations, fix blemishes, add text, and more.
After your photo is just the way you want it, you can use it to create an email postcard, or use it in your own tours.
I live in the Nashville, TN area, so as you can imagine, there are quite a few great places to visit. As “Music City,” Nashville is the home of Country Music. The nightlife is fabulous, and there are also numerous museums and historical sights to visit. The app supplied an excellent driving tour that showed 6 locations to visit in the Nashville area.
By tapping the various spots supplied on the map, I was able to view photos and notes entered by the user who created the tour. Each stop had the option to get directions to that stop on the tour, and you could continue to the next stop by simply tapping a button.
I found the app extremely easy to use, and using it didn’t lead to any complications that took away from the enjoyment of the tour.
You aren’t restricted to the area you are currently in. If you’re planning a trip, you can use the “City Search” feature to search for specific cities or areas to view the tours that other users have created for that area. As a crowdsourced app, the more popular the location, the more tours you’ll be able to access.
One by-product of the crowdsourcing nature of the app is that you’re not restricted to the standard tours you may read in a travel book or website. For example, the Chicago area included a tour of Chicago’s best independent bookshops. London, England included a tour titled “London With Children.” Excellent!
I did find that occasionally, that a selection indicated there were a number of tours for that area, if you tapped the button, there were no tours available.
Verdict
If you enjoy traveling, and exploring a city or location on your own terms and at your own pace, I highly recommend VadoVia. If you don’t want to spend your time on a tour bus with a load of other tourists, VadoVia is a must-have purchase for your iPad. It allows the user to explore areas at their own tempo, and the crowdsourced nature of the app might even help you discover sights you normally wouldn’t even find out about. Be sure to pay-it-forward though, by creating tours for other users. Especially if you discover sights that are off the beaten path. An app like this is only as strong as its users.
Rating:4.0/5.0[rating:4.0]
Price: $5.99 – Available for the iPad in the App Store. [DIRECT LINK]
Pros:
- The user created tours in the app will lead you to places you might not discover following along in a travel book, or on a scheduled tour.
- The ability to create your own tours is a true plus. The ability to share your own information about your favorite locations is such a plus.
Cons:
- Occasionally even though there were tours listed for a specific locale, none were listed when you went to the list.
- The price might be a turn-off for some, but a good travel book for one location will cost you double or triple the $5.99 you’ll spend for this app.
*Note: The above review was commissioned by the developer in accordance with our app review policy, and has been written in an objective, unbiased fashion.
