This post is from staff writer April Dykman.
As I write this, I’m in New York City on a trip I spent about two hours planning. Normally, I like to do my research. I firmly believe research work upfront saves a lot of time, money, and hassle while traveling, but this vacation snuck up on me, and I ran out of time.
So far we’ve managed to make our way around just fine without spending ridiculous amounts of money or getting lost (especially nice since it’s a bit colder than the 78-degree weather we left behind). One of the reasons things have gone so smoothly is that I did have time to download the free NYC Way app before we left home, and it’s been such a help that I wanted to share it with GRS readers.
Trip-planning with MyCityWay
Launched in 2009, MyCityWay is described as “a one-stop discovery platform for over 50 categories in the city — including restaurants, nightlife, public restrooms, transit, traffic, tourist attractions…” and more. Available for iPhone, iPad, Android, and Blackberry, the MyCityWay currently has an app for about 20 cities, mostly in the U.S. London looks like the first venture into international cities.
So what does this app do that’s so helpful? First, you can create a trip, which stores all of the places you want to visit for easy access. After saving places to a trip, you can view information about the places, such as museum admission prices, hours, phone numbers, and more. You also can go to a map view that flags each of your places.
I looked up a few articles about New York City on the Frommer’s and Budget Travel website, picked out the places and restaurants that sounded good, and searched for them on the app (it found all of them). I added them to a new trip. I also checked out the list of free things to do and added a couple of places that seemed interesting. We’re spending six full days traveling, so after marking about 20 places, restaurants, and activities, I can use the map view to see what is close together and make a general plan each day.
Another great feature is that MyCityWay works with GPS, allowing the user to select a place from the trip and get directions for walking, bicycling, or driving from their current location. Last night I got off the subway, opened my trip, selected The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and instantly had directions and a map for the quickest way to walk there from the terminal.
The app also has been useful in getting around the city, something for which you can’t always plan. It includes a restroom locator, street eats, coffee shops, wifi locations, transit information like subway routes and locating the nearest terminal, grocery stores, and more. There’s even stuff locals might find useful, such as parking, apartment listings, classifieds, job listings, car services, and live traffic cameras. After going to a museum, if you’re craving a pizza from somewhere within walking distance, you can search by cuisine and immediately get a list of the closest pizzerias, plus reviews.
According to their website, MyCityWay plans to roll out additions like personalized local recommendations based on user profile, choice history, and current situation. “Premium productivity features” — I’m guessing that means a paid version — will include features to plan a day in the city, write notes and to-do lists, and collaborate with friends.
I admit I was wary of becoming a smartphone user. But I made the switch a few months ago, and between MyCityWay and a few museum apps that have helped me to easily navigate from one place to the next on one small device (no maps, travel books, and brochures to lug around), I’ve been sold.
What are some of the ways you use technology to save time and money while traveling?
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I like the idea of MyCityWay even though it is a bit limited in international cities. I would love to see it have other cities in the world then it would truly be a versatile tool.
Thanks for sharing this, April. Have a nice trip back.
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MyCityWay huh?
I really want a smart phone, but I promised myself that I wouldn’t buy one until my wife and I ridded ourselves of our debts.
Based on our budget, we should be out of debt by April 2011! Then, it’s time for the Smart Phone.
I can’t wait!
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The app looks great– I’ll definitely check it out. Let me know if you need any NYC suggestions from a local, though, too.
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The Mycityway way assumes that you have are already in poccession of an iphone or an ipad.
I consider both of them to be a waste of money.
If I get lost in NYC, I will do it the old fashioned way that is free.
ASK SOMEBODY ELSE FOR THE RIGHT DIRECTIONS.
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At first I thought mycityway was a website, and I was all happy as I am dying to go to NYC and I could use some travel suggestions. I don’t have a smartphone either, so it looks like I will have to stick with Tripadvisor!
I will keep this in mind if I ever invest in a Smartphone though.
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I like trip advsior!
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You could also just pick up a copy of the New Yorker.
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Also, even our small town has a thriving Yelp community.
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Like many of you, I do not have a smart phone so I cannot use this app. When I have traveled to Hawaii or Walt Disney World, I used guide books and my GPS to get around. However, even if they are the newest version of the books, they may not be fully updated. We looked online, in a book and using the GPS and one place we were looking for was out-of-business. No big deal though, as Hawaii had plenty of great options for restaurants.
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Earlier this year, my husband and I did a driving trip from Indiana to the Florida Keys (where nothing is inexpensive) and back. We used my husband’s iPhone and our GPS to pick a route, make trip changes, find a campground, find local restaurants (using Yelp or Urban Spoon), motels for the night, and spots of interest. I know the iPhone has a GPS app but it wasn’t as good as our car GPS. It turned out to be a great trip – spontaneous, but not as expensive as spontaneous can turn out to be.
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NYC at Christmas!!! I did this last year and it was wonderful. It’s a little hokey but visit Macy’s Santaland on the 9th floor (I think). If you’ve read David Sedaris’ short stories your visit will be even funnier. I also recommend going up and down 5th avenue and looking at all the shops – their decorations are amazing.
If you want a good “financial experience” eat at Bobby Vann’s Grill across from the stock exchange. You can request to eat in the vault. This is the original JP Morgan’s bank vault and it is nothing short of one of the coolest places to eat. The menu isn’t too expensive – at least not by NYC standards. The burger was great. The vault is in the lower level restaurant (The Grill), not the upper level steakhouse. While you are in the financial district the Museum of American Finance is pretty good, too. They have weird hours though.
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Welcome to the city, April! It’s a great time of year to be here. Do go see the windows at Macy’s and along 5th Ave – I’m a resident, and I go check them out every year.
FWIW, I too get by without a smartphone, although I plan to acquire one next year.
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Is this an article about personal finance, or a product review/advertisement?
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YD
This article definitely is not about Personal finance or frugality.
Looks like this is a paid advertisement for Iphone, Ipad, Mycityway app, android, droid or whatever.
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It sounds like a combination of yelp and google maps will do pretty much everything this does, work on any device with an Internet connection (including your home computer), and even support international cities and small town.
This article basically says: “I can use the Internet on my Internet-enabled phone to look up things that I’m interested in.” but it does it in a very product-specific, dare I say shill-like, way.
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I don’t have a smart phone, nor do I have a GPS…I have this amazing thing called a map. They’re available for every city, and most even have interesting places to go marked on them. I also tend to fly by the seat of my pants on my spur-of-the-moment trips, usually finding my way around simply by exploring and asking folks for directions or interesting places to see and restaurants to eat.
I don’t mean to sound mean; I appreciate what you’ve discovered, April! But some of us are not in the position to afford smart phones and their monthly data plans. How does the cost of the phone/plan/app compare to the money you saved using it?
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Before our trip to Italy and France, for example, I downloaded a bunch of podcasts, PDF maps, and iPhone/iPad apps to make things easier. They didn’t make things easier. They just got in the way. The only tech tool we actually used frequently was the set of podcasts from Rick Steves. Everything else gathered virtual dust.
What did we do instead? We used free maps that were readily available in each city. We also used our guidebooks. Now the guidebooks aren’t free (and I’m not sure if April’s app is or not), but that’s okay because they’re packed with info and worth far more than their cover price. We also talked with locals. These old-fashioned ways of getting around worked well. If anything, I feel like the tech solutions would have just got in the way of what I wanted to do. They’d create more problems than they solve.
On another note: I’ve had an iPhone for about three years, but I’m thinking of ditching it. Has anyone else done this? (Wait. Did I already ask this here at GRS? I think maybe I did.) I find that I barely use the smartphone features, so I’m paying $70/month to play games while I wait in line at the take-and-bake pizza place. Ouch. Just writing that out makes me want to cancel the plan today.
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@13-15
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: GRS doesn’t do paid posts. We do, however, review books and products from time-to-time. There’s nothing wrong with this. April thought this app was worth reviewing. I have to trust that she genuinely finds it useful (it sounds like she does).
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Thanks for sharing this info. I am a planner, too, but found myself with only a few days to plan a trip to NYC a few weeks ago. This would have been helpful, and I will definitely use it for a return trip.
IMO, planning DOES help you save money. And having this info on my ipod would have been much easier than having a tour book and a subway map to lug around & haul out to reference all the time.
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Most useful piece of technology I’ve encountered in awhile: mint.com. I can’t tell you how useful it’s been in keeping up with my finances. I always wanted to get more organized, but the idea of doing data entry into Quicken or other programs was enough to make me avoid it altogether. But mint has taken away that excuse – and now I know where all my money goes, down to the penny, at any given point.
With a smartphone and the mint app there is no reason to ever go over budget – whenever I get the urge to buy something, I just whip out my phone, check my current spending, and that’s it. Ridiculously useful.
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This is, as I understand it, a site that focuses on being smart about money rather than just being frugal. It’s an important distinction and it comes in to play with this post.
I appreciate that many people do not have a smart phone. As a result, this post isn’t much use to you. For my part, I don’t have children, so posts about family things are of little use to me. Not ever post is going to be relevant to every reader, and that’s OK.
As a smartphone owner, I am always looking for free or low cost apps to help me. I am self-employed and travel quite a bit for my work, and travel apps have been a huge boon in the last few years. Tripit.com and its associated app, for instance, builds my itinerary based on the online reservations I make. It’s been a huge help and have saved me time and money, since I no longer have to print off all my various travel documents. (United Airlines will even send a paperless boarding pass to your phone.) Yelp, Tripadvisor, Urbanspoon, Kayak, etc. have largely replaced guidebooks, which I always used to buy, just as my phone’s GPS means I don’t buy maps.
My point is that an article about smartphone apps is, to my mind, completely in tune with what this website is about, and for some of us, a big help.
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This article seems like a lightweight inclusion in this blog. You won’t Get Rich Slowly if you need to have every whizbang electronic gadget that comes out. For cripe’s sake, get a map and keep it in your pocket. Maybe the post belongs in a blog about *covenience*?
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Someday I’ll have a smart phone and do all these cool things!
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had to chuckle when i read this article. i was just in NYC saturday and sunday and used my Android phone to get around. i didn’t use this app, but i used the google maps, starred places beforehand for easy access. i selected directions, (from where i was standing) to a location, and then click public transit, and it would tell me the exact station, train # & time to get me there and walking directions. i would just leave the written direction screen open when i went underground so i could check which train to get on. smart phones are FABULOUS!
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The best way to save time and money during travel is to plan ahead, as much as you can. Tripadvisor.com and google reviews (easy to find through google maps) are very helpful and offer many good tips. Google map streetview is very useful, specially to have a good idea where your hotel is located and which landmarks there are nearby. Paper, old-fashioned guides are particularly useful and handy, and I usually buy them an year old (amazon.com used books) for nearly half-price, because IMO updates don’t matter that much. Most touristic destination, specially big cities, have good websites, and metro trains or subway sites are useful when travelling to Europe. For instance, I went to Paris and all my transportation needs were fulfilled with a €50 Paris-Visite card: a tip from an old Frommer’s guide, coupled with internet information.
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I agree with MD Account. What I appreciate about this website is that there’s a lot for everyone to appreciate and learn from in one article or another. I’m 56, single, grown children, no debt. I’m a professional photographer and having an iPhone changed my life professionally and personally. I’ve made as much money selling my iPhone photos (because of the absolutely amazing phone apps) as I have with extremely expensive cameras and lenses. I travel a lot, and the travel apps have saved me enormous amounts of time, because for me time=money. On a personal level, I am so grateful that I had an iPhone and took lots of videos of my mom before she died. Whenever I miss her terribly, all I have to do is watch videos on my iPhone. I would not have been able to take videos of her with a video camera the same way I could with my iPhone–it’s small, it doesn’t intrude on the moment. Also, I don’t like carrying around a lot of equipment, and the iPhone has been invaluable in this respect. I was anti-iPhone for years, until I saw what I considered a perfect photo taken with one, and from that moment on, I was hooked. I now conduct oral histories with the iPhone video app and voice memo feature for my photography/oral history projects.
The apps I use all the time when traveling, and which I feel have saved me money and endless travel frustration, are:
MapQuest
AAA Triptik
AAA Roadside
Flight Track
Gate Guru
Kayak
Packing Pro
American Airlines
Skype
Paris Metro
Convertbot
Currency
myWireless
Accounts (financial)
Yelp, Urbanspoon and AroundMe
WhiteNoise
Weather Channel
Lonely Planet guidebook apps
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How does a smart phone save me money? I use it so much, I’m thinking about getting rid of my home internet subscription. I can do almost anything on the phone and what I cant, I can do with my laptop at a wifi hotspot. Or is a laptop an over-the-top non-frugal gadget also?
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@JD, I’ve never had a smart phone and see no reason to get one. (I have internet connection at home for $15/month and at work which covers all but 1 hour of commute time per day.) I’m sure they come in handy once in awhile but I bet I could handle any problem that people THINK you need a smart phone to solve.
Personally, I find it sad that wherever you go, people are huddled over their tiny little screen instead of interacting and talking. My wife and I went to dinner the other night and the 2 ladies behind us barely said 2 sentences to each other the whole time, preferring to play with their phones.
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The itinerary portion of this app reminds me of TripIt but I like the addition of hours/recommendations/etc of the events you have planned. However, I find TripIt’s auto-importing services very useful so I doubt I will make the switch.
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I’ve been using Expedia for the booking and Thrillist (in cities they have) for finding cool places to visit. I’m definitely going to check this website out though
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To J.D. @ #17 – If you’re considering ditching your iPhone solely to lower your bill, but the iPhone suits your needs otherwise, there’s a better way: keep your iPhone and ditch AT&T and their mandatory data plan.
T-Mobile is happy to have iPhone users switch to their service and they will not require you to buy a smartphone data plan. In my experience, T-Mobile’s coverage and customer service is better than AT&T’s, and I’ve gone from paying $45/mo for my old AT&T dumb-phone talk/text plan (and that was w/ a corporate discount) to *less than $20/mo* for a T-Mobile prepaid monthly plan (limiting iPhone data use to WiFi.)
(BillShrink.com was very helpful to me in determining what wireless carrier & calling plan best fit my needs and budget. I would not have considered a prepaid plan, but BillShrink.com analyzed my bills and showed me I could save at least $225/yr that way.)
Your 3yr old phone is out-of-warranty anyway. You can jailbreak and unlock your iPhone and leave AT&T. The process sounds more daunting than it actually is. IIRC, you use mac computers, so you could download the Pwanage Tool software from iphonedownloadblog.com (they have guides and tutorials there as well). Pwanage Tool is free and pretty easy to deal with.
Unlocking will free you from AT&T and the extra cost of a data plan that you don’t feel you need; and jailbreaking will add other functionality to your iPhone (if you want). You’ll be able to lower your monthly wireless bill and keep the phone that’s paid for and familiar to you.
The only downside is you must remember to never ever update your iPhone’s software from iTunes in the future or you’ll lose your unlock. (When you want to update the iOS, wait for Pwanage Tool to be updated and do it through there. If you ever need to restore, you tell iTunes to do a manual restore, and point to your Pwanage-created backup).
I was given a handmedown iPhone 3g and love it – I can sync calendars and contacts, and use some great apps for photos, tuning my guitar, keeping my grocery lists, etc. I’ve never had a smartphone w/ data plan and didn’t want to start, knowing I’d get used to having it and then feel it was a “need.” WiFi is good enough for my day-to-day needs, and because I can take/make most calls using my home phone (using google Voice, so no long distance costs and a metered service plan for about $17/mo total), the T-Mobile prepaid monthly plan suits me just fine these days (it’s $15/mo for unlimited texting + $.10/min for calls). If my needs change, I can switch to a regular plan and add data, and still not have to go back to AT&T and their headaches.
So before you ditch your iPhone, you might consider the option to unlock and ditch your carrier and data plan.
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