Our free mobile app is now available in the App Store! Use it to browse hundreds of expertly curated guides and thousands of incredible travel highlights to get inspired; plan your own trip by saving highlights; and download your lists when you’re on the road without worrying about connectivity or roaming charges.
We’ve completely redesigned the iOS7-optimized AFAR Travel Guide. If you’ve used it before, great!—time to try it again, and see all of the new features. And if it’s new to you, welcome! Read on for a little overview on all of the new and improved functionality.
Browse Curated Content
When you first open the app, you’ll encounter this screen (at left). It contains curated guides (each on displayed as a triptych with the Guide title at bottom, accompanied by the guide author’s name) of various destinations around the world. Tap one of the guides to enter and browse through the individual highlights in that guide.
There are two more ways to browse without leaving the home screen: tap the ‘Highlights’ button to see a selection of curated highlights, or tap the ‘Nearby’ button to see all the highlights close to you.
Search and Discover
Tap the button in the top righthand corner. Here, you can search by location or topic. The app will save your recent searches, so don’t worry—you won’t have to type out ‘coffee’ every time you arrive in a new destination. Each pin on the map represents a highlight—tapping on the pin will pull up the details of the highlight. While on the map screen, you can pinch, zoom, and click ‘Search this Area’ to discover amazing things to do and see. This feature is ideal for those looking for weekend or day-trip travel ideas without knowledge of particular areas. You can also view the search results in list form by clicking the list icon at the top right on the map.
Take It With You
While viewing a particular highlight, you’ll see a screen like the one at left. You’ll need to log in to engage with a highlights—and that’s when the truly useful functionality of the app will become obvious. You can ‘like’ the highlight by tapping the heart symbol; save the highlight to one of your lists by tapping the star symbol; share the highlight by tapping the upward arrow symbol (all content can be shared via Twitter, Facebook, Email, and SMS Text); or view the location of the highlight by tapping on the drop-pin symbol.
Should you decide to save a highlight, click the star symbol at the base of the highlight screen, and you’ll see a screen like the one at right. From this screen, you can select the list to which you’d like to save the highlight (you can select multiple lists), or you can choose to create a new list. Any highlights you save on the mobile app will be reflected on the website the next time you log in—and vice versa. All the lists that you save on the website are available on mobile. Save as many highlights to a given list as you’d like. Lastly, when you’re gearing up for your trip, and you’re not sure whether there will be wireless connectivity, simply select the lists you’d like to download to your phone—saving you any worry about roaming charges, wifi hotspots, or access to your information while you are in the midst of your journey. (If you’ve downloaded your lists prior to your flight, for example, you’ll be able to review your trip plan with your mobile device in airplane mode—just in case you’d like to hit the ground running.)
Create and Share
Last, but certainly not least, is the ‘Create a Highlight’ function. When you decide to create a highlight, you’ll see the screen at left (minus the photo—that will come from you!). Tap the sections to add an image, title, and description, and select a category for your highlight (you can select more than one, but try to think in terms of the essence of the experience—a restaurant, while it offers both food and drink, may be more of an ‘eat’ highlight, while a bar would typically fall under ‘drink,’ even if they do offer salted peanuts). You can then add tags (think of them like hashtags—they help to improve the highlights’s visibility in search in the app and on AFAR.com), and, if you’re ready to send it out into the world, simply hit ‘Publish,’ in the top right corner. If you’d like to review your highlight later before making it public, just hit the ‘Finish Later’ button to save it as a draft.