In the last decade or so, TripAdvisor has grown from scratch to being the world’s largest travel website with over 75 million reviews to help plan your holiday.

It makes you wonder, how we managed to plan holidays before the advent of the Internet. Is this a good hotel? Where is the best seafood restaurant? What else is worth seeing around here?

TripAdvisor, if you are not familiar with it, uses reviews and opinions from ordinary travellers to rate places of interest, such as hotels and restaurants. More than 50 reviews are posted on the site every minute. 

It has become an extremely useful, and powerful tool, that can make or break an establishment.

That power is now at your fingertips, with the Windows Phone app now in the Nokia Collection, so you can discover the best recommendations on your Nokia Lumia even when you’re on the move. 

The App

The app opens up with an ‘explore’ screen that features four tiles: Hotels, Attractions, Restaurants and My Saves. 

The app is really simple and straightforward to use. If you want to search for a hotel, tap that tile and then type in the city or destination that you are visiting. 

The ‘My Saves’ function lets you save any places that you want to keep for easy access. You do this by tapping the ‘+star’ icon that appears at the bottom of every review. You could also pin the review to your start screen. 

The app has a ‘near me’ screen so that, if you allow it to use your location, you can see all the places of interest in your immediate area.

Similarly, if you press the search button, you can type in any global destination and choose to see the results as a category list (hotel, restaurants and attractions) or in a map view.

You can pin the results, as a tile to your start screen, which is particularly useful if you’re staying in a city for several days and you might be consulting the recommendations and reviews on a regular basis. 

Within the settings there are some simple options to customise your app experience, such as selecting a default currency and units of measurement.

It can be daunting task when you are trying to pick a hotel or restaurant. The TripAdvisor app is a welcome tool to help make those choices just a little easier.

Image credit: Bert Kaufmann