Love it or hate it, it's pretty hard to avoid TripAdvisor, and they're doing their best to be even more inevitable by rolling up a bunch of available features into one Swiss-army-knife of a mobile travel app.
The new app will replace TripAdvisor's free-standing City Guides and add in a number of other functions, including restaurant reservations using both TA's OpenTable unit and Priceline's TheFork, tour arrangements through TA's recently-acquired Viator, flight and lodging searches, and the ability to book the hotel, flight or car right from the app.
The City Guides, which now number in the hundreds, started as review listings but have been built out over several years into real guides, and have been enhanced with downloadable maps. There are filters to allow more focused searching for history, food, art and more.
Travel industry news site Skift, in its report on the new app, says that TripAdvisor has avoided the oversell and made the app relatively neutral as a guide...but very useful. Early user comments on the Android Play Store are mixed; some users find it slow or buggy, while others are happy. As they used to say...YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary). We'll keep a Gumbo eye on it for a while and then report again.
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