While it’s intelligent to travel with smartphone apps, mTrip’s new sharing features allow you to take things a step further. You can keep track of trip memories and share them with friends whenever you want on the web.

Use mTrip’s iPhone or Android app to build your trip itinerary, take photos of your adventures and keep track of your trip journey in a journal. Then simply sync your trip from your phone and voila – you have your entire trip saved to the web on your own personal page.

It’s easy to sync your trip at any time. Just wait for a WiFi connection at a cafe or the hotel and your whole trip journey can be published online. Friends can follow along your journey in real-time while you are out seeing the sights and when you get back home, you will have all your trip memories saved in one place. Share the trips by Facebook, Twitter or email.

And don’t forget, if you need some help planning your trip, use mTrip’s online travel guide for tons of rich travel info: places to see, eat and sleep with ratings, reviews, image galleries, opening hours, prices, nearby places viewable on a map and much more.

Have fun sharing your trips!

Being the most tech-savvy of them all means going above and beyond. And so London hotel, Eccleston Square has done just that. Claiming to be the first hotel in Europe with an iPad2 in every room and offering what they call ’007-smart wizardry,’ Eccleston is allowing customers to easily manage every conceivable function, gadget and gizmo from one device. An app is available for guests’ mobile devices and includes tools like temperature, lights, curtain control, restaurant reservations, room service orders, spa reservations, housekeeping, along with helpful tips on the hotel and the city area.

The gadgetry doesn’t end there though. The rooms also come equipped with docking stations for iPhones & iPods, 46-inch 3D plasma televisions, Blu Ray DVD players, VoIP phones, HD television screens in the bathroom and ‘smart glass’ bathroom walls. WiFi is also free, which in many hotels can be an added expense.

Of course the hotel comes at a price and the price isn’t pretty. Rooms start at £250 a night. Even at this price, they should do a great job of enticing the tech-savvy bunch. And this could usher in a whole new crop of 21st Century high-tech boutique hotels.

Set to open August 1st

Do it the high-tech way & use mTrip’s London Travel Guide to get around!

Photos of Eccleston courtesy of Eccleston Square Hotel

One of the cities to adopt mTrip’s technology is Trondheim, Norway. They have customized the technology to their needs, which is part of mTrip’s offering: you may take the mTrip features and add on more to make the application unique to your city.

At the launch of the Trondheim Guide, the app took first place in travel in the Apple App Store. It’s success continues with positive promotion of its city and a fun way for visitors to get around.

“When the Trondheim Guide was launched early May 2011 we immediately got very good feedback from the app users and I think mTrip deserves most of that credit due to the quality of their software. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend the app or working with mTrip to other tourism boards,” says Pål Sommerseth, Project Manager – City of Trondheim.

Trondheim White Label App

Here is what tourism offices get with mTrip

• Cutting edge technology to promote a city
• International exposure and greater visibility in social networks
• Forming great relationships with tourists
• Customizable application for each city, with ability to add new features
• Features like: mTrip Genius, Offline Routing, Augmented Reality, Sharing and more
• A new Web App, allowing travelers to publish & share their trips with friends online
• Simple & fast implementation
• Available on iPhone, iPod Touch & Android
• Eight languages included and the ability to add new ones

Trondheim guide on iPhone

Trondheim guide on Android

For more information on the white label app visit mTrip for Tourism Boards

For information on mTrip’s commercial app visit: www.mtrip.com

You can also see destinations that have non-stop flights from specific airports. For example, search ‘flights from New York’ and Google will return a number of routes from New York’s airports as well as which airlines fly from the airports. You can click ‘Show all non-stop routes’ to get a full list of destinations; from there you can click in to get more flight details.

What do you think of Google’s new flight search feature? Do you think it will be useful when you are searching for flights?

Google Flight Search

Image: preston.rhea

Each city has something unique to offer the world of technology. Whether it’s a vital tool or just a simple gadget, we’re impressed and have listed them below. So without further ado, here are the top five destinations for the tech tourist.

Beijing

We had to put Beijing at the top of this list for their approach to traffic jams. They’re currently experimenting with what they call the 3D Express Coach, also known as the ‘straddling bus’. It is effectively a bus on legs, whose body spans two lanes of a road but which lets cars travel beneath it. Supplementary power will come from solar panels on the roof, and it’ll be 90% cheaper to build than a comparable length of subway. Trials have yet to start, but they’re supposed to begin towards the end of 2011.

Tokyo

The government of Tokyo is extremely keen on near-field communications technology – the kind of gadgets that let you and your smartphone ‘check in’ when you arrive somewhere significant. They’ve taken it further in Tokyo though. The aim is to create a Minority Report style city where everything is referenced using NFC, accessible to locals and allowing tourists to ‘see the sites’.

Technology has already played a part in overcoming Tokyo’s navigation problems. The city has many unnamed streets, so in the eighties maps were sent by fax to prospective visitors. Tokyo was responsible (in part) for the proliferation of fax machines, and then later GPS for the same reason.

Dubai

While Dubai appears to be the epitome of sleek modernity, there have been some stumbling blocks. The internet is highly regulated and very expensive, with the average broadband package costing around $40 a month. What’s more, the government is anxious not to let companies use VPN connections to bypass their own cumbersome internet structure.

On the other hand, Dubai has built some incredible things. The Burj Khalifa is the world’s tallest building at 828 metres, built using the world’s tallest ever concrete pumping and serviced by the world’s fastest elevators (40mph).

Vienna

Vienna University is at the forefront of 3d printing technology. While the technology isn’t new, Vienna University has produced a small, cheap one – their version weighs about 1.5kg and will probably cost around €1200 ($1,700), making it a viable addition to the manufacturing and healthcare industries.

 

London

 

A simple app called Tube Status is a must if you’re going to be in London for any length of time. The ancient and idiosyncratic London Underground (aka the Tube) is prone to failure – this app will warn you before you descend the escalators.

Claire Tucker writes on behalf of Tripbase. When she isn’t travelling, she’s usually planning her next trip.

Images: Erman Akdogan, chusico

Most of you who use mTrip though already know that everything is offline, including:

• The mTrip Genius trip planner
• Maps & Directions
• Augmented Reality
• Travel Guide directory
• Creating postcards & reviews

To share a postcard, here’s how:

Go to the ‘Guide’ tab > go to any place in the guide (attraction, hotel, bar, etc…) > tap on the ‘Postcard’ icon in the bottom right corner and voila!

Once you have a WIFI connection, you can go to the ‘Share’ tab to send your postcards via Facebook or email (or send it right away if you like)

To share a review, here’s how:

We’ve just made updates to mTrip, allowing you to send your reviews & ratings via Facebook and share with your friends. You can save them as pending & just wait for WIFI to avoid fees from your data plan. As before, you can share your reviews with other travelers inside the mTrip app.

As an app developer, especially in travel we try to be creative in offering our users an experience that is Offline yet still allows travelers to do the interesting things that are only available online. This is where syncing updates and sharing on social networks and email come into play.

To send the postcards or share reviews/tips, you just want to wait for a WIFI connection to sync the updates. In other words, if I create a postcard, I will wait until I arrive back at my hotel, a cafe with free WIFI or home to send the postcards by Facebook or email. They will be waiting for me in the mTrip share tab. Using mTrip’s postcard sharing feature saves me the task of finding postcards and stamps and sending them by snail mail. Instead, I can share the pictures along my journey so my friends and family can see what I’m doing at that moment, as opposed to much later when I have already left that location.

We hope you enjoy the sharing features! If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments.

Roam large with no roaming charge!

Download the iPhone & Android travel apps here!

If you pop into one of their stores, the app will be available for demo on their iPhones. We are grateful that Apple is giving some of our customers the chance to demo the app! The ability to demo an app and have certainty prior to purchase is very valuable.

Here is a list of a few of the Apple Stores where you can demo the app:

Apple Store, SoHo, New York

Address: 103 Prince Street, New York City, NY, 10012

Apple Store Opéra, Paris

Address: 12 rue Halévy, 75009 Paris, France

Have you seen the mTrip demo in any other Apple Stores? Please let us know in the comments so we can add it to the list.

The apps are also available for direct download here!

No Android device yet? No problem. The Amazon App Store for Android allows you to purchase apps even before you have the device you intend to download them on, so you will be stocked up and ready to go by the time you get your Android phone.

mTrip is also available on the Apple App Store & the Google Android Market

<<Download mTrip on Amazon App Store>>

mTrip’s offering on Android is similar to its application on iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, with easy to navigate buttons and an intelligent trip planning and guiding experience.

Features include:

• The ‘mTrip Genius‘, which automatically creates personalized trip itineraries, taking into account travel interests, trip dates, accommodation, pace preference, and traveler ratings
• Full travel guide directory with attractions, monuments, restaurants, hotels, bars, shopping and other destinations
• Ratings, reviews and image galleries contributed by experts and travelers
• Augmented Reality with points of interest super-imposed onto ones phone
• Offline map and location-based navigation by foot or subway
• Sharing e-postcards via Facebook and email
• Free daily updates
• No Internet required (except sharing and updates done through WiFi)

We are really excited to extend our commitment to travelers by offering mTrip on more mobile devices. We can’t wait to get our app in the hands and footsteps of more travelers!

If you have any questions or comments about the new Android app, leave them here or get in touch with the Support team at support@mtrip.com

City destinations available: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Munich, London, Madrid, Moscow, Paris, Rome, Venice, Vienna, Istanbul, Dublin, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Washington, Tokyo, Singapore and Shanghai.

Grab your brand new mTrip travel app for Android!

A great idea this holiday season is gifting an app from iTunes. They are easy to purchase, you don’t have to fight the crazy shopping crowds and with so many apps in the App Store, you can easily tailor the gift to just about anyone.

Here’s how:

Click the screenshot to enlarge

1. In iTunes go to iTunes store in source list
2. Search mTrip (or whatever app it is) in the top right corner search box
3. Choose the specific app you would like to give
4. Click on the arrow to the right of the Buy button
5. Select ‘Gift this App’
6. You will either be asked to sign into your iTunes account with your name and password or you will be navigated to the ‘Give a Gift’ page. Once here, you will have to fill in your details, and gift recipients details as well as a personal message. You will also be asked if you would like to send the gift via email or if you would like to print the gift yourself
7. Once you’ve signed in and completed the ‘Give a Gift’ form, you wil be brought to a page where you can review and confirm your purchase

It’s just that easy to gift an app. From business to travel, music to medical and more there really is an app for that person who has everything.

What kinds of gifts are you giving this holiday season? Are you planning on gifting any apps?