Jetpac, recently acquired by Google, is a company that makes image-recognition and travel apps—an odd pairing, to be sure, with only three apps to show for it. The flagship app, called simply Jetpac, best hints at the company's true potential, though. The iPhone-only Jetpac (free) is a travel app that combs Instagram for images that enhance the app's recommendations for what to see and do in given areas. The images not only make the locations more tantalizing and exciting, but they also help categorize the true feel of each spot. For example, if a particular sightseeing spot has lots of photos of families, you can probably bet it's safe for children.
Jetpac helps you explore cities and regions of interest, or places nearby, by delivering listicle-like results, such as 10 Places Most Popular With Men, 5 Hipster Hangouts, 10 Bars Women Love, and so forth. They can sound rather click-baity, and they sometimes border on trashy.
Features
All the results come with images, which are culled from Instagram. The list of 10 Bars Women Love near me in Queens, New York, includes at the top a lounge called Maracas, where I can see a bikini-clad woman took a selfie. That selfie-taker shared her photo on Instagram and included her geolocation at the bar—that's how it turned up in Jetpac.
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You can swipe through more images of the current location or scroll down to see more location suggestions. Starlet's Gentlemen's Club, number two on my list, contained even more selfies of lovely ladies.
Not all the listings focus on buxom babes and fishnet stockings, but, rest assured, there is plenty of that. The fact is, certain demographics are more likely than others to use Instagram (and take selfies), and it's those people and their pictures who are more likely to show up in Jetpac.
The app offers mapped results, too, so you can figure out where you might want to go based on location, instead of just looking at the Instagram images from the different places. Every location also has a relevancy score, meaning how often Jetpac thinks the Instagram photos are relevant to the location.
It seems as if any time a person is in the picture, that's deemed relevant, perhaps because it gives you an idea of the crowd likely to be on hand. Each place also has some information about the kinds of people who tend to post photos, such as "startups," "petlovers," or "men." I'm not sure how that information is culled, but it's probably part of Jetpac's secret sauce.
More Than Just Travel
Speaking of which, the two other apps by Jetpac, called Spotter and Deep Belief, have to do with computer-based object-recognition in images, which is likely the real meat of the company. In the travel industry, it's not hard to imagine how image-recognition could help power an app to, say, recommend things to do and see. Images of nightclubs, restaurants, and sightseeing locations become all the more appealing when they are appropriately tagged with information about the kinds of fashion, desserts, and people (families versus young singles, for example) you might find in these different places.
Back to travel suggestions, a big drawback for the Jetpac app is that it has a couple of poor design implementations. For example, a few times, I searched for a city or region (Milwaukee, Bali) and ended on a failed search screen. I assumed this meant there were no listings for those places. But not so! Another attempt eventually found them. The problem is that when a search does fail, there's no back button. There's no home button. There's only a reload button. What does it do? I presumed the search was occurring a second time, but who knows, as there's no indication of what's happening. Eventually, the app pushes you back to the Top Guides page. There's no information about why the search failed. That's not a good user experience.
The app also doesn't work well with iPhones older than the iPhone 5. Users on older devices report consistent crashes and freezes.
Don't Hold Your Breath
Don't hold your breath for the Jetpac app to improve. Since the announcement of Jetpac's acquisition by Google, the company said it would remove its three iOS apps by September 15. Download Jetpac before then if you're curious, but stick to other travel apps—such as Gogobot and TripAdvisor—for recommendations nearby or in cities you're visiting.
Jetpac puts a novel twist on making recommendations to travelers by scraping Instagram for photos of what you might find—including the clientele—at different sites. It won't be in the App Store much longer, though.
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