Tired of tours led by affable college students? You're in luck. In a major update released this week, self-guided city-tour app TripScout added full audio guides for seven new cities, as well as curated maps for another 20 destinations. Available for iOS, TripScout integrates audio tours with GPS-enabled maps that are available offline. Created by local guides, the story-driven tours focus on a city’s history, culture, and food. Even better? Each guide costs only $4.99—far cheaper than a guidebook—and TripScout donates 10 percent of the revenue to charities.
The audio guides included in the update include Antigua (the island, not the town in Guatemala), Boston, Buenos Aires, Chicago, Granada, Mexico City, and New York City. These cities join existing guides for Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., which were available when the app was in beta. The new curated maps cover popular destinations in Europe and Africa, as well as Austin, Bogota, Dubai, New Orleans, and Panama City. Additionally, the update sped up the app, reduced the amount of storage space the guides require, and made some visual changes, including a unique page layout for each city.
Konrad Waliszewski, TripScout’s founder, CEO, and guide for Washington, D.C. (where he lives), said the criteria for adding the new cities were user requests, popularity as travel destinations, competition from other travel resources, and his own travel desires, as he personally vets the guides: Waliszewski temporarily relocated his home base to Egypt to make it easier to scout guides in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and after that work is complete, he thinks he may make a short-term move to Southeast Asia while TripScout adds destinations in that region.
Further down the line, TripScout plans to add guides for every major travel destination worldwide, with the launch dates for future audio tours depending on Waliszewski finding the right local guides. “I just take a bunch of tours, and when I have that one experience that I really love, then I usually reach out to them,” says Waliszewski, who has visited 70 countries, and launched TripScout in August 2015.
Beyond incorporating guides for new cities, Waliszewski said TripScout is considering adding information about restaurants and hotels, as well as building a community around the app. But the focus will remain on created local tours. “I don’t want to be an app that you open up and you have hundreds of things to chose from, and then you have that whole paradox of choice that you might have on TripAdvisor,” Waliszewski says.