Traveling is a hot summer topic for most countries around the world. Since most of us are going on vacation and planning a nice trip, we tend to review and share more traveling tools during the high traveling season.

We have had a bunch of useful travel planning tips already. Here's a fun Facebook tool to make your travel plans social, here's how you can plan a road trip with Virtual Tourist and don't forget to check out Gowaza to make an informative travel plan map. This time we are sharing a brand new travel planning iPhone app from Stay.

Stay is a free fun web-based tool we have reviewed previously. Basically, it offers a great feature set for planning and mapping your traveling and then saving and sharing your plans with friends, relatives or random people. Just a few days ago, the site launched their official free app for the iPhone which makes downloading and accessing your travel guides much easier.

Creating Your Guides

To create a travel guide, you will still have to use the web-based application. This is the first thing to do because you won't be able to do anything with the app unless you have an account with Stay.com with travel guides already created.

Creating a guide is addictive though. The web interface is clean and very easy to use: you just browse the places and add them to your guide. There is no clutter or extra details interrupting the process. You browse the categories (like "Attractions", "Restaurants", "Art Galleries", " Hotels", etc) and add anything that looks worth visiting to your guide. Search results are sorted by popularity among the site users - which makes picking fun places even easier.

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Once your guide is ready, you can download it to your iPhone.

Using The iPhone Application

To upload your saved guides to your iPhone you will need Stay's official application which is free. When you have it installed, log into your Stay.com account (it supports Facebook login which makes things even faster). Immediately after you log in, you can download your guides.

The best thing about having this app is that all your city guides will have a complete offline map, so when you are away traveling, you don't need to worry about finding an Internet connection:

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To edit, improve or complete any of your existing guides, you will need to use the web-based interface again. But the good thing is, your iPhone guide will be updated automatically:

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Travel Guides Inside Your iPhone

You will most likely love having your travel guides inside your iPhone because:

  • Your guides are well structured (all your favorite destinations are broken into categories, so you can easily plan each day of your vacation),
  • You can view your guide on the map with all your chosen destinations pinned;
  • Each place you have added to your guide has a "more info" section with photos, description and location details.
offline maps iphone

What do you think of the tool? It looks like a high-quality free app that is worth a check. I am not sure how the app works for less popular locations though. I have checked a few and it seemed to be rather detailed. What's your experience?