App Review: Your Next Vacation for iOS

I love to travel, but in the grand scheme of things, have not done all that much of it so I’m always looking for suggestions on where to visit next.

When I heard about the Your Next Vacation app that promised to give great suggestions on where to take my next vacation based on likes and dislikes, I’d tell you I was excited.

The interface is very straightforward and is easy enough for anyone to figure out and begin using immediately.

Opening the app for the first time, you must walk through telling it some of your favorite destinations, some that you didn’t like, favorite beaches, historical destinations and national parks. Then, it will give you a list of destinations that it believes you’d enjoy visiting and then fine tunes the list to the number one locations on each continent.

It is a simple and fun app and several of the places it suggested are in fact places I have visited and loved which means that it works. It was fun to discover that Kyoto and Istanbul were suggested to me and I had never given either much thought, but am now researching them further.

The app has huge potential, but unfortunately right now it has a long way to go before being something more than a fun app you play with once and then never go back to.

What I’d love to see them add would include:

• A way to go back to my recommendations. There is only a next button (no back) and once you’ve gone through them you have to go through the whole process again which is not very user friendly.
• I didn’t like that it forces you to put in such rigid information because I’m not a beach guy so picking my favorite beach town was a complete lie just to move through the process.
• It would be great if they added in simple questions to further fine tune the results. Do you prefer the city or the country? Luxury or roughing it?
• Link to more information about each destination. Only showing a photo and the name doesn’t do much for me. Link users through to the tourism board for that country or a Wikipedia page.
• Allow users to browse the database right from the beginning instead of forcing them to go through a five minute setup. People love to browse.

Because of these shortfalls, I can’t recommend the $1.99 current price. Hopefully they’ll make it even better in the future and then it’ll be worth the money to purchase it.

Disclaimer:  A free copy of this app was provided with the expectation that a fair and honest review of it would be provided.