With a passion of the Big Apple, a group of Indians who worked on Wall Street developed a smart phone app for tourists and locals. They spent two hours a day working on this project and combined more than 50 apps into one popular app called NYC Way. This award-winning app is free for smart phone users (available for both iPhones and Android phones), but a small fee will be charged to venders when a reservation is made. Building on this NYC Way concept, similar travel apps are also available for popular destinations like Washington D.C. and San Francisco.
I discussed a cell phone app for event planners in April and a restaurant app in May. A colleague of mine also told me he wants to develop some useful apps for hospitality professionals. I think that is a great idea. What ideas do you have in mind? Well, you don’t have to tell me your ideas until you turn them into smart phone apps, but please share with us what travel or hospitality apps you use. In your opinions, how useful are they?
I discussed a cell phone app for event planners in April and a restaurant app in May. A colleague of mine also told me he wants to develop some useful apps for hospitality professionals. I think that is a great idea. What ideas do you have in mind? Well, you don’t have to tell me your ideas until you turn them into smart phone apps, but please share with us what travel or hospitality apps you use. In your opinions, how useful are they?
The problem I have with most restaurant apps is that most are hand picked and rated so unfairly. Not only that, but many only list the most popular and limited only to a brief description about one’s experience there. Some seem very clearly fabricated a restaurant manager, while others are rants about how unhappy they were as customers.
ReplyDeleteA great restaurant app should connect all of your friends together. When someone goes to a restaurant they really like, they can take a picture of their food and upload it. This does a few things: it allows you to trust the poster since they are your friends after all, it allows all of your friends to see a real (and un-manipulated) picture of what was served, and it even allows a simple hotdog stand to be included into the database along with other favorite hotspots. With this, users could track how often their friends go to a certain restaurant and even get a visual on what’s good on the menu.
I agree with Julian, most restaurant apps only have popular restaurants, but they usually do not have those small restaurants that you only know about if you live in the area ( which are usually better in my opinion).
ReplyDeleteAnother good idea that might be added in the future is the ability to view the menu in a restaurant app, but not just the actual menu, maybe add pictures of the more popular entrées and other items. I feel that this idea would definitely be beneficial to people who don't really know too much about a particular restaurant because it would give them a detailed view of the restaurant without them actually going there. It would also help tourists pick the perfect restaurant that suits all of their needs.