It’s so easy to get disorganized on a trip. When you’re out of your normal settings, everything gets out of order fast. Plus, you went on vacation just so you could get away from sticking to a calendar like you do every day at work, right?
Today we’re going to look at an app that can make organizing your trip both easy and fun. Itinerary is a beautifully designed app for iPhone and iPod Touch that helps you keep up with what you’re doing and where you’re supposed to be throughout your trip. If you’ve found it boring or difficult to keep a schedule while on vacation, Itinerary may change your mind. Plus, it can even be helpful if you’re actually traveling for business since it gives you a head’s up view of each day’s schedule.
Ready to takeoff? Let’s go!
Getting Started
Itinerary starts off with a nicely designed help guide that looks like a deck of photos. Swipe your finger to the left to switch to the next picture and get a full overview of how the app works.
Even the intro help screens are beautifully animated … swipe left to view the next slide
Once you’re finished, you’re ready to start adding your upcoming and current trips. Itinerary will show an empty leather wallet, simply tap the plus button to start adding your trips. Add your departure and return date, then enter your departure city and destination city and country. Tap Save when you’re done.
Add your upcoming or current trips, including destination and dates
As you add trips, you’ll see your wallet fill up with virtual tickets. Just seeing all your trips as tickets isn’t too useful, but tap the tickets to add what you’ll be doing throughout the day. The ticket will automatically include the number of days that you indicated you’d be on the trip when you created it before, and you can swipe between the available days from the top band. Just tap the plus at the top of any day’s page to add what you’re doing that day.
Tap a trip, and the ticket slides out with a 3D animation so you can add your itinerary on the back
Schedule What You’re Doing on Your Trip
Itinerary App does a great job at letting you add your activities and the locations you’ll be visiting on your trip. You can enter the location you’re going to, along with the city and country. Tap the icon on the top left to change the location tag; you can choose from over a dozen built-in location types. Oddly enough, you have to press the icon then press Save, though it would make more sense if you just pressed the tag and that added it.
Enter info about what you're doing, complete with icons of the destination category
From here, you can add the location you’re going to visit. Tap the Locate In Map button, then enter your destination in the search box. Itinerary App uses the city information you’ve already entered to locate destinations in that area, so it was amazingly easy to find the places we were visiting. You can also add notes about your destination before you save it. As you’ll notice, Itinerary is beautifully designed throughout the app, which makes it really fun to use.
Add location and notes to your outing
As you add more and more things to your day, you’ll begin to see your ticket fill up. The icons make it easy to spot the different things you’ll be doing, and you can see your notes about the outing under the destination name. Tap the event, and Itinerary will open a nicely styled page showing a map of your destination with your note on a notepad underneath.
View what you’re doing each day, then tap an entry to see your map and notes
Features and Design
Itinerary is one of the nicer designed apps I’ve used recently. From the ticket wallet to the animation when opening the events list, the entire app is beautiful and fun to use. I really enjoy natural textures in apps, and Itinerary incorporates them beautifully.
The only real problem I noticed is that the app is somewhat limited in its feature-set. I would have loved to see a way to download a copy of trip data to a computer, or perhaps synced with an online itinerary or calendar app. Also, it’d be fun if you could add pictures from your trip to the locations you added. There’s a lot of potential here, and even as-is, it’s one of the simplest and cutest trip planners I’ve seen.
Conclusion
If you’ve been looking for an easier and more graphic way to plan your trips, Itinerary app is a fun way to do it. It makes it simple to get a list of everything you’re doing and all your destinations, and could be an easy way to keep a travel journal with notes about each place you’ve been. The graphics are top notch, but we do wish it had a slightly deeper feature set. That said, sometimes it’s best for an app to be simple, and Itinerary definately wins there.
How do you usually stay on top of everything you’re going to do on a trip? Do you have some favorite travel apps?