City Guides, Offline Maps (for iPhone) Review

Stay.com is a website that lets you explore new travel destinations and cobble together a loose itinerary for what you might want to see, do, and eat when you arrive. Its free iPhone app, technically dubbed City Guides, Offline Maps, but more commonly known as the Stay.com app, moves all that functionality onto your smartphone, and then saves much of it for you to use offline. You can plan new trips from the app, as well as import itineraries you've designed on the website. The offline functionality, including maps, make Stay.com's app a superb resource for international travelers, although the suggested things to see and do can be bland at times.

Where Can You Go With the Stay.com App?
The way Stay.com's app works is you can select a city from its impressive list, and then dive through additional submenus about the location until you land on interesting suggestions. For example, if you were planning a trip to Riga, you'd select Riga from the list of city options, then see additional choices such as Top 10 highlights in Riga, Kids' activities in Riga, Shop Like the Locals in Riga, and so forth. Each option brings up additional options, like major attractions or suggested places to go, from museums to spas to ruins.

The cities covered by Stay.com span the world, but of course there are limits. Destinations in the U.S., Canada, and Europe are plentiful. Major cities of Asia and South America are included, too, but you'll find less and less once you start searching for locations in Africa, Oceania, Central Asia, and the Middle East.

What's Inside the Stay.com App?
Two years ago, I took a city break to Montreal and have been meaning to go back—or hit Quebec City—ever since. Quebec City wasn't included in Stay.com's selected cities, which made the decision to plan yet another Montreal escape easier.

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Scrolling through the list of attractions in Montreal, I remembered bicycling alongside the Lachine Canal and hiking Mont Royal, two suggested points of interest beneath the subcategory Active Holidays in Montreal. On any suggestion, you can hit "Add to guide" or "I've been here!" the latter taking you to a screen where you can enter a star rating, which are used in Stay.com's aggregate ratings, and a few notes about the site.

Next I found an entry for the Dieu du Ciel brewpub, and a restaurant that I didn't have a chance to visit on my last trip. Add to guide? Yes and yes.

As you add items to your guide, Stay.com saves them to a designated space within an area called "My Guides." All your custom guides appear at the top of the app's home screen. But the app does not automatically save them offline. It waits until you've finished customizing your list of attractions in a city, and then waits for you to manually hit "Download city," which is smart because the guides can eat up a lot of space on your phone. You can also delete the offline content any time without deleting the itinerary from Stay.com in general. In other words, all the guides you create are always saved and available to put on your iPhone via your Web account. I paged through suggested places of interest in other cities that I know much better than Montreal because I've lived there, namely, New York, San Francisco, and London. Most of the suggested points of interest, hotels, and restaurants were pretty run-of-the-mill, the kinds of places you'd expect to find in a major tourist guide.

The maps are my favorite part of the app. Details and zoom-ability aren't lost with the offline versions. All the destinations you've marked appear in purple, while all the ones you haven't specifically saved to your guide remain on the map, but appear in blue. Countless times while traveling, I've had to punt on a desired café, coffee shop, or restaurant where I thought I might eat because, in the heat of the moment, it was too far from my actual location when I got hungry. In times like these, you can either take a gamble on whatever's closest, or pull out a travel book and look for a recommended place somewhere in the vicinity. With the offline maps, you can just zoom in to your present location and see what's nearby, even if you haven't saved those restaurants to your customized guide.

I should point out that you can't actually plan your trip in any significant way with the app, which is to say, there's no included calendar or way to mark things to do in the morning, afternoon, and evening. I'd love to see that functionality—or something comparable with integrations into other calendar apps—make it into a future release.

Sharing and Other Extras
You'll need a Stay.com account (free) to use the app, or you can authenticate using Facebook. If you're traveling with friends, you can invite people to collaborate on the itinerary through email or Facebook. You can share you guides more generally via Facebook and Twitter, too.

Before you mark a guide to be saved offline, the app can be a little slow to load, even on a Wi-Fi connection. Another minor gripe is that I wanted to see more photos in this app, especially before I leave for a trip and have time to surf on the couch and daydream about my destination.

One minor incident happened in my virtual exploration of Montreal: I found a few restaurants that looked interesting, but their descriptions were in French, not English. Sacré bleu!

Stay to Go
City Guides, Offline Maps (for iPhone), also known as Stay.com's iPhone app, will stay planted on my iPhone until my next international city break, as the offline maps will definitely come in handy for travel outside the U.S. The points of interest and other suggestions target the usual suspects in most cities, but on a short holiday, that's all I'm likely to cover in a new city anyhow.

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