Travel App - Esplorio

British Airways ran a tech incubator called Hangar 51 in the early part of this year, taking five start ups and hothousing them. BA clearly take the project seriously as the 100 or so people who were at the ‘Demo Day’ in late March included most of the top 10 most influential people in the organisation, including Willie Walsh and Alex Cruz.

I snuck in under a catering trolley.

One idea stood out as being something you might like to see. It’s a smartphone app called Esplorio. Essentially, it creates a travel journal automatically, using your phone. You tell it that you are going away between X and Y date, it runs away in the background and the photos you take are automatically mapped and presented in a really easy format. It even works out where you had lunch and clever things like that.

You can add titles and comments if you want but even if you don’t it basically outputs a photo album with a map and place names.

Best of all though, is how you share these trips. Firstly, your trips can be set to public or private so you aren’t having to tell the world where you are. Secondly, most importantly, you don’t have to share it on social media. Instead, you can ask it for a link. This you can email to friends and family, they click the link and see your trip on a secure web page. They don’t need to have the app, you don’t need to be some Facebook expert.

It seems to be one of the few apps which sidesteps social media and that awful phenomenon of over-sharing everything!

Just so you can see that I’m not above over-sharing, here is my trip to Costa Rica from late last year (you can plug in historical dates to Esplorio and it works it all out like magic!). Bear in mind that I did literally nothing to create this beyond take some photos on my phone and tell Esplorio a date range for my trip.

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The Pothole is Pura Aventura's popular monthly email. We share what we love, what interests us and what we find challenging. And we don't Photoshop out the bits everyone else does. We like to think our considered opinions provide food for thought, and will sometimes put a smile on your face. They've even been known to make people cry. You can click here to subscribe and, naturally, unsubscribe at any time.