Excursion app review: a social travel planner for the avid traveler

Introduction

As a kid growing up the travel planner in our house was my mother – when it came to vacations she made all the decisions. I’m not sure if my dad was simply happy to go wherever as long as he was on vacation, or if he just left that to my mother to avoid any arguments. Chances are for most people over the age of 30 they would have had similar experiences (although it could have been the dad doing the planning in your house instead of the mom). Today our travel planning has become much more sophisticated with apps like foursquare and Kayak – now we can instantly read reviews on any major tourist destination, including hotel reviews. Excursion is an app that uses the powerful features of foursquare to provide you with a platform to create and share travel plans. The Excursion - Social Travel Planning is a free app and it’s compatible with the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.

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Make Your Travel Plans

There is no doubt that you have a whole lot of options when it comes to creating travel plans with today’s mobile devices. Apps like foursquare allow anybody to review just about anything about a city or location they’d like to and there are tons of sites and apps that provide reviews of hotels and resorts in just about any city or country. Excursion doesn’t provide a custom engine for its app – the information and reviews you find are all powered by foursquare, but what makes this app special is that it allows you to take that information and save it as your own travel itinerary, which you can then share with friends and family.

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While this app does provide an excellent service, it could do a better job of instructing the user how it works. There is no automatic walk-through of the app when you open it for the first time and there is no obvious help section to get you started – at the top of the app it asks you what are you up to and how do you want to plan your day. If you tap on this section of the app it does open up a page with a couple of basic instructions, but it’s not overly informative. It takes some experimentation with this app before you really get the hang of it. The Excursion app will require 30.7 MB of available space on your iOS device

How It Works

As we’ve suggested above, to start planning a trip you tap on the X at the top of the screen, which will open up a planning screen. There are essentially two parts to the planning process. In the first step you’ll want to tap on the location finder in the bottom left corner and you can then either select a location nearby you or enter a custom location in the search bar at the top – you then save this as the location for your trip. In the second part of the process you want to choose places to visit and you can do this by tapping on the map icon in the bottom right corner of the app. This brings up an interactive map with icons dotted in various locations indicating the places you can visit. If you tap on one of these icons it will provide you with a short description of the attraction, activity, eatery, or nightlife location – all you have to do to add this to your itinerary is to tap on the + icon that appears in its description. Alternatively, you can also search the things to do by scrolling through a list of attractions.

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Once you’re finished creating your travel itinerary you can save it for off-line viewing and you can share it with friends and family. To view your travel itinerary you have a couple of different options: you can view it in map view by tapping on the map icon which will allow you to see any items that are on your plan indicated on the map, or you can tap on the icon in the bottom right of the menu and view a list of the attractions you’ve chosen to add to your itinerary.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• Allows you to create travel itineraries for anywhere in the world
• Includes both a map planner and a list planner
• Let’s, you save your itinerary for off-line viewing
• Allows you to share your travel plans with friends and family

Cons

• Instructions are vague at best

Final Words

If you’re planning a trip in the near future it’s probably a good idea to have a plan. Excursion is a great app for helping you to plan your trip. This app will let you choose just about any location on earth and provide you with all the local attractions to choose from. You can then save this itinerary and share it with friends and family. This is a must-have for any frequent traveler.