Reviewed: 8 Romantic Travel Apps in iPhone & iPad for Honeymoons & GetawaysBest Romantic Travel Apps for Honeymoons & Romantic Getaways  Custom Search By Greg Mattson, ERV Editor - Posted: Jan 20, 2012
…but is it worth you hard-earned 99 cents?
If you’re like us (and many other travelling couples with smartphones and iPads), you’ve already downloaded apps like TripAdvisor, Kayak, various translation apps, and used built-in functions like Google Maps and weather forecasts.
But there are various vendors on both the App Store and the Android Marketplace that have developed and are marketing apps directly for romantic travel, including honeymoon planners, accommodation finders, destination guides for couples, and more.
Are they worth the screen space on your smart phone? Excellent Romantic Vacations.com recently reviewed 8 romantic travel apps –designed and marketed specifically for couples travel. Here’s our findings, opinions, and recommendations… Romantic Travel Apps for Honeymoons
1. Top Honeymoon DestinationsFor: iPhone & iPad By: Joviant Technologies Price: $0.99 Comments: “Famous” or “Favorite” – that’s the choice you get when this honeymoon app opens up. “Favorite” turns out to be empty until you add your own to it from the 180 destinations described inside. The content appears to be mostly travel articles you can find for free online. Each destination page includes attractions, climate and accommodation, although specific hotel or resort recommendations are few, with no links or ways to find out more. Photos are mostly average, 1 per page generic-type. The app covers honeymoon spots all over the world (over 100 in Europe and Asia), although only 12 in the USA, Canada and Mexico. Overall Rating: Fair – some usefulness in comparing destinations, especially outside of North America. 
2. Best Honeymoon DestinationsFor: iPhone By: NTS Price: $2.99 Comments: The opening screen on this romantic travel app lays out 8 categories with a total of 23 different honeymoon destinations (about 1/2 of them in Mexico & the Caribbean), taken mostly from articles that appear on the honeymoons.com website. A couple taps to select your choice, and you get a scrollable brief introduction to the holiday spot. Below that there's push-button access to additional features like restaurants and best hotels (usually 3 for each place, with only address and/or links to websites). You can also access must-see attractions and a Apple-style flip photo gallery. The photos were quite vivid, although there's no captions to indicate exactly what you're looking at. The overall design and the graphics on Best Honeymoon Destinations are a bit cheesy, but once you get to the actual content, it's somewhat interesting and useful (where to ride an elephant in Thailand, or locate a hotel serving High Tea in Capetown, etc). The Jamaica section included info on Mystic Mountain, so it seems reasonably up-to-date. Overall Rating: Fair-Good. Get past the look and feel, and there's some value to this app. Romantic Getaway Apps
3. 60 Romantic Getaways of the WorldFor: iPhone By: Mobile Travel Price: $0.99 Comments: The 60 getaways highlighted on this Mobile Travel app range from mainstream destinations like San Francisco and the Bahamas all the way over to exotic locales like Istanbul and Cambodia. At least that's what the "Show Me" map pins indicate. Tapping a pin on the world map presents a colorful photo, a short Wikipedia-like description (how romantic!) and...another map, in case you really don't know where in the world it is. One other function, entitled "Near Search" presents a push-button interface to help you quickly locate the nearest hot spots like Attractions, Pizza Huts (!) and "Hospitlas” [sic]. Tapping any button opens up yet another Google map, this one with some small purple markers. The info "bubbles" on the map are questionable at best. For Vancouver BC, activating "Hotels" displays a map and markers that includes a few hotels, plus a travel agency and a couple of low-end budget establishments more suited to backpackers than honeymooners. Overall Rating: Awful. Total waste of 99 cents and your screen space.
Comments: Apps Publisher.com shows up on the Apple Apps Store with numerous romantic travel apps covering many spots like the Bahamas, San Francisco, New Mexico, and so on. It’s impossible to review them all, of course, so we decided to try the Romantic Getaways in Nevada edition, and downloaded the application onto an iPhone for $6.99. The guide was divided into 3 main sections (Vegas, Laughlin and Mead, NV). A tap at the bottom of the screen brings up some fairly deluxe controls for changing font style and size, day/night view, making notes, and even recording voice memos. However, the main problem with the app is the information itself, which, in a word, is dated. We checked, and it turns out the Las Vegas section was published in 1998. The hotels listed are from that era (Bally’s, Caesar’s, Excalibur), which means nothing is said about more modern romantic favorites like the Venetian, Bellagio, Paris Las Vegas and Wynn Encore. A check on the restaurant suggestions also showed establishments that are no longer there. Also absent from Romantic Getaways in Nevada are maps of any kind and pictures of good quality – shocking when you consider that many free or 99 cent travel apps offer them aplenty. Paying $6.99 for this app got our hopes up that we’d get an outstanding tool to enhance our next holiday in Nevada. But it’s clear there is nothing here that you couldn’t get in spending 10 minutes with TripAdvisor or Google, both free and much more current. You’re just stuck with an expensive program that’s out-of-date and graphically mundane. Overall Rating: Very Poor. Definitely not worth the price.
Romantic Travel Apps for B&B's and Inns
5. InnTouch Bed and Breakfast LocatorFor: iPhone & iPod Touch By: American Historic Inns Price: Free Comments: Affiliated with the iloveinns.com website. Map function works very well in showing inns, and interfaces with Google Maps nicely. “Nearby” search results seemed to miss several establishments close by. App includes one touch access to the inns own websites and pictures of the properties (a bit slow loading at times). The rating system is rather hit-and-miss as many inns have no reader reviews (or not enough). An included recipe tab provides dozens of recipes from B&B innkeepers – interesting, but we're not really sure why it belongs in a travel app. There's no booking capability built in, however there are both 1-touch “call the inn” and “e-mail the inn” buttons. Overall Rating: Good. A nice addition to TripAdvisor for finding small inns.
Comments: While the app initially showed some promise in finding accommodation nearby, after 5 minutes of use, we were scratching our heads and asking, “is that all it does?” Even though it indicates that it has found multiple properties for a given destination, it’s extremely poor design limits what you can do beyond that. There appears no way to go beyond locating only 1 of the inns on a Google map, and then seeing a description and some reader reviews of the place. Map movement was fidgety, only 1 tiny picture of each inn is supplied, and there’s no way to contact the B&B by e-mail or phone thru the app.
Overall Rating: Very Poor. Don’t waste your $1.99
Comments: Since this app is strictly for locating accommodation in the UK, we were unable to test its “Search Nearby” capability from our home in the Pacific Northwest. But the app's listings for places to stay in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland is very comprehensive, much like the printed AA guides themselves. We tried numerous searches for accommodation in both cities and small villages all over the United Kingdom, and each time iPhone screen lit up with multiple B&B’s in the area. One-tap functions are included for contacting the inn by phone or e-mail, as well as a link directly to the inns own site.
Overall Rating: Very Good. If you’re planning a romantic vacation in the UK, this is a useful app to have.
Comments: Contains listings of B&B's that are part of the New England Inns & Resorts association (NEIRA) in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island and Maine. The selection is adequate, although by no means comprehensive. This map function will test your pinching ability on a Smartphone! Unfortunately, once you're done all the zooming and sliding with your finger, identifying the location you want, choosing a place from the pins on the screen and tapping through, the reward is not worth it. You're left staring at a sparse screen with 1 photo, the inn's address and 2 links for the website and phone number. There is a News feature at the bottom the app, which we noticed included a couple of online deals and weekend packages for inns. Strangely enough, while missing some important tools, the app includes a function on the top right that enables you to send an e-mail containing a picture of the inn. Why it's there, we're not sure.
Overall Rating: Poor. Of limited use before or during your vacation.
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Planning a honeymoon? Getting set for a romantic weekend getaway? There’s an Romantic Travel App for that!
4. Romantic Getaways (Series)
6. Select Bed & Breakfast Finder
7. AA Bed & Breakfast Guide 2012
8. New England Inns & Resorts Association