Exploring a new city is an exciting opportunity to discover new food, culture, and experiences. However, it’s easy to get bogged down in tourist traps and destinations catered to tourists. That’s not to say popular tourist destinations are bad; iconic landmarks like the Parthenon in Athens or Stonehenge in England are well worth a visit despite the massive number of tourists that visit daily. But sometimes you want an unforgettable experience that your friends at home haven’t heard of.
There are plenty of apps that can help you discover a new place; Google Maps is probably already installed on your phone and is the easiest way to discover your next destination. However, most of these tend to prioritize the most popular locations, which is not what we’re looking for here. These apps (plus one website) will help you find the destinations that the locals know about, but tourists don’t. Paired with the apps you need before you travel, your smartphone will get you through your holiday smoothly.
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Spotted by Locals Travel Guide
Get recommendations from locals
You can ask anyone you meet on the street for recommendations, but it’s hard to know whether they’ll give you an authentic response or not. Some people will give you a well-known tourist destination, while others may recommend the first thing that pops into their head, even if it’s not exactly what you were looking for. It’s hard to know which recommendations are worthwhile, which is where Spotted by Locals helps. The developers have hand-picked locals who they can rely on to give a variety of authentic, worthwhile recommendations that you may not hear about elsewhere.
Spotted by Locals curation means that the recommendations you find may not be as esoteric as those you can get off the street. However, what you will know is that each place has been checked multiple times before you go. Each recommendation comes with a short description from the local, plus useful information like website links, prices, and instant navigation links. You can access a single city for a one-time fee, or pay a subscription for access to all 80+ cities. It can feel expensive, but it’s well worth it for the detailed recommendations from locals
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Visit A City
Access tried-and-tested itineraries
On the surface, Visit A City is a fairly standard travel app. Once you give it your location or your final destination, it will generate a list of local places to visit. You can check prices, visit websites, and read reviews from other users. But what makes it special is that you can create and share itineraries with other people. While it doesn’t put you directly in touch with a local, with careful research, you can discover interesting and unique places shared by others.#
In Visit A City, you can create a plan of all the places you want to visit, then the app will help you plan out your trip with estimated travel times. This is useful, but what you want to do is explore the plans created by other users. You can read reviews, notes, and comments to find out which people have created plans that take you to unique places, and those that just list off popular tourist destinations. Unfortunately, the selection of plans you can access isn’t many, but it’s still a great starting point for planning your trip.
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Showaround – Find a Local
Get unique tours from independent guides
The best way to explore a city like a local is to know one, but as we discussed earlier, asking random strangers is fraught with risks. Spotted by Locals is a great way to get local recommendations, but it’s still a fairly impersonal experience shared by the thousands of others who use the app. Tour guides offer more personal experiences, but they tend to stick to popular tourist destinations. Showaround lets any local sign up to be an independent tour guide, and you can even request the types of places you want to visit.
Showaround is a bit like Airbnb for tour guides. It’s worth taking time to read reviews of your chosen guide, as unlike Spotted by Locals, your experiences can vary significantly in Showaround. But as you can set preferred hours, destinations, and mode of travel, it’s the perfect way to get a personalized tour from a local. You can even create a rough itinerary for your visit, and locals will make you offers with travelling suggestions.
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Atlas Obscura
Discover unique places
If you’re willing to do some research, Atlas Obscura can take you to unique places you would never find on TripAdvisor. It’s a travel guide dedicated to unique and interesting places. While some of these are well-known as tourist destinations due to their unique or eye-catching nature, many others make the cut as they’re weird or unexpected. However, it’s not perfect.
Atlas Obscura’s biggest flaw is that it contains too many destinations. Many of the locations you’ll see in the app are only superficially interesting or tourist traps avoided by locals. It’s slow to catch up with closures, so you may find that the unique place with great reviews you meant to visit has been shut for months. However, it’s perfect for finding small, off-the-beaten-track destinations that, while they won’t take up your entire day, are the perfect way to add some variety between visits to big attractions.
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Like a Local
Get tours and tips from locals
Like a Local doesn’t have an app, but you should still keep the website bookmarked on your phone next to the other travel apps we’ve recommended. It provides a similar service to Spotted By Locals; residents can provide information about the city to assist visitors. However, while Spotted By Locals gives you short descriptions of various destinations, Like a Local takes a much broader approach on top of specific recommendations.
Like a Local contributors write various blog posts for the website. These cover topics from “How to survive winter in Paris” to “Top 5 New York bars with a view.” Contributors also recommend sights, restaurants, cafes, bars, shops, and tours in a similar way to Spotted By Locals. However, the range of recommendations is inconsistent across cities, so just because you see your destination city on the website, it doesn’t mean there will be many useful articles about it. But for popular cities like London, Paris, and New York, you’ll find plenty of recommendations.
Travel like a local
Nothing will ever match the years of knowledge accumulated by a local, but through these apps, you can see and do much more than the average tourist. The best thing to do is to combine all of these apps. Create an itinerary with Visit A City, and sprinkle in recommendations from Atlas Obscura to liven things up. Or find some unique places in Spotted by Locals and ask your guide from Showaround to take you to them.
Of course, you’ll need to get to these places first. Knowing how to use Google Flights effectively can save you time and reduce stress when you next book a flight.
