As someone who travels a lot I’ve been trying out apps that can build tours around a city.
CreateTrips is a social trip planner that offers travelers and locals travel guides, maps, reviews and a few more things. It’s raised $2.18 million in two rounds from five investors.
But unfortunately it literally leaves me to do all the heavy lifting. And in this space, you pretty much only have really basic trip planners, or the app is just a search engine with no information triage.
Which is why when the founders of the inviita iOS app (download it here, video demo here) came up to me and demo’d a tailor-made city tour which had literally been built on the fly from my Facebook and Foursquare data, I was intrigued.
inviita lets you log in via Facebook and then auto-magically builds you a tour based on a mood you select. You have a range of moods you can choose from, like Foodie, Artistic, Party People or Romantic. If you’re in an artistic mood you’ll get museums, galleries, etc.
You can either see an existing tour in a particular city or select a mood and get an automatically generated tour, or create your own from scratch.
Places are displayed on a map and you can look each one up, as the app pulls in data from Foursquare.
You then just drag and drop the places onto a tour timeline (a really nice UI touch) to create or customize an existing tour.
You can then share the tour on social media if you want.
Furthermore the founders have come up with a very clever hack: it’s also the only app you can find via emoji on the iTunes App Store to date.
As someone who would like good suggestions from a city but does’t have a lot of time to research, I’m going to be testing out inviita a lot.