For business travelers, keeping all the details of the various trips can be a challenge; and for international travelers, dealing with the differences that make our world wonderful to explore can be challenging as well. Helping to deal with these problems is Splash Travel for iPhone by SplashData.
Splash Travel is best described as a travel reference application; both to reference details about your trip (such as your flight and hotel reservations) and to reference the various things that travelers deal with when they arrive, such as currency exchange rates, clothing sizes, and time zone differences. While there are separate applications that serve many of these functions, Splash Travel handily includes the most needed data in one application that will get you through the majority of trips.
TRIP DETAILS
One of the most fundamental features of any application of this genre is to collect and keep track of the various reservations “ flight, hotel, rental car, etc “ that you hold. Splash Travel does a good job of this, allowing you to input the requisite data with a minimum of fuss with one exception: airline reservations. Splash Travel here has a great feature that is also its one flaw; it asks for the date of travel and the departing and arriving airlines, then downloads and shows you a list of flights to select from. The selected flight is added to the record of your trip (you can have more than one active trip at a time), and the details of the flight, such as the gate, type of aircraft, and baggage claim are displayed and can be updated. However, and I consider this to be a serious problem “ if you either do not have an internet connection, or cannot find the arrival or departure airport, or the actual flight, you ‘re stuck “ you cannot enter the flight manually. My current trip entailed 3 outbound flights “ Tampa to John F. Kennedy in New York, JFK to Dubai, and Dubai to Mosul, Iraq. All three were regularly scheduled commercial flights, yet Splash Travel could not identify Mosul as a valid airport by either city name nor the airport identifier. Fair enough; the travel sites on the web I checked couldn ‘t find either the airport or flights to it either “ but the fact remains that I could not enter it manually. I tried a few itineraries on Travelocity and Orbitz, each of which showed me flight options that Splash Travel did not, which would again render you unable to track your chosen (and presumably booked) itinerary. For example, Splash Travel listed several Delta and Airtran flights from Atlanta, GA to Newport News, VA but failed to include options from US Airways and United. This is the Achilles heel of the application, and one that I hope is corrected in a future version.
You can also choose to add car rentals, train and bus reservations, and details about hotels and restaurants that you ‘re planning to frequent, and events that will occupy your time.
TRAVEL TOOLS
Where Splash Travel earns its keep is in the many tools that it offers to help you deal with the various changes that one encounters in travel.
The Time section offers the current time in your home (selected) and current (GPS or manually entered) city, plus any other cities that interest you. A world day/night map shows your location, the home and current time, and allows you to check the time zone at any point with the touch of a finger on the map. However, here there was a minor quibble, as the flag for my home city of Tampa was clearly located in the next time zone West. The Time section also offers a time calculator, which shows the time AND date in various cities that you select, calculated from a given time and city. A date calculator shows the number of days between two dates, and also has the flexibility to calculate the date a given number of days, weeks, or months away from the starting date.
The Calculators section offers a currency calculator (which can be optionally updated online when the app starts up), a unit calculator (with temperature, distance, and speed “ which you would need and expect in a travel app, but also oddly including power, time, and circular measure, which I have yet to require conversion of in my travels), a tip calculator, and a clothing size calculator. Of these, the latter has come in the most handy thus far, as the shoes offered for sale here can be marked in US, EUR, or UK sizes “ or any combination thereof. I was quickly able to determine that my size 8 1/2 feet were a EUR size 42. Charts are provided for jackets, shirts, shoes, suits, sweaters, and trousers. Having had to buy clothes on more than one international trip, this is a feature that I truly appreciate.
The Lists section includes a Packing list, a list of Country and US Area Codes, and contact info for car rental companies, airlines, hotels, and travel services such as Orbitz, Priceline, and Travelocity as well as AAA. It also includes a basic expense tracker, which I found somewhat cumbersome but serviceable.
CONCLUSION
Splash Travel does a decent job of managing your travel related details and a good job of providing the reference information that you are most likely to need while you ‘re away. However, the limitations surrounding the entering of airline reservations “ which may be a deal breaker to many “ preclude a recommendation at this point. If and when SplashData does address this issue, it will have earned a recommendation, and likely a spot on the frequent traveler ‘s home screen.
Splash Travel is available in the App Store for $4.99 (iTunes Link).
SplashData provided a promo code to Just Another iPhone Blog for the review of Splash Travel. For further information regarding our site ‘s review policies, please see the ‘About ‘ page.
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