Planning activities is always a challenge when you have out of town visitors. Its the not knowing what to do, where to go or how to make it interesting.
The forecast looked good and so we planned a day drip to York. It’s not that far for us as we were travelling by car from Manchester, so roughly an hour and a half to get there.
I don’t know York, but given the images and reviews on Tripadvisor this looked like a great place to explore.
I looked into walking tours and was surprised about the cost per head and the limitations that it would place on our time.
Sometimes you just want to stop, look around a shop, get something to eat and take your time admiring the view.
So when I discovered the Pandemic Tours App I was intrigued. Here was an app that claimed you could have “Self-guided Walking Tour Experiences around cities and attractions are now available on your smartphone”.
So with app downloaded and the promise of “Let Amy show you the top attractions and history hiding in plain sight in the beautiful city of York! This is an entertaining and informative experience for everyone to enjoy – whether you’re a local or a newcomer to the city.” we were expecting a very personal tour.
“Overall this app gets a big thumbs up from us.“
The app is not as intuitive as we would have liked. By way of example we launched the app which opened on the about page.
We navigated to the Tours section and chose York.
The page invites you to login to download or Purchase £6. … you can’t see the rest of this button as it is too wide for the phone. I have the iPhone 12 mini and you can’t rotate the app to wide screen.
I had a code already as this had been sent to me so took a chance that “Login to Download” may be a place to enter the code and it was.
Once loaded you are offered a button to “Start Tour”.
A map opened showing numbered waypoints.
It took a little while to figure out that starting at the York Cathedral was number 1 on the map and would have benefitted from a pop up explanation of how the app was to be used. It quickly became obvious that we needed ti click on the displayed item at the bottom of the screen to launch the guide for this Waypoint, the headphone and play symbol were really helpful and showings where to start.
We started our tour by stopping and listening to the first audio guide.
I’m afraid we were all surprised to a hear a computer generated voice that was neither human or entertaining.
That said and once we had realised that “Amy” was a computer generated guide we all quickly settled into the clear explanations, history and interesting facts given to us about each point of interest.
We all feel the order could have been better planned as we found ourselves more than once retracing steps to move to the next numbered point.
Overall though the app gets a big thumbs up from us. We all found it helpful, more than interesting and well worth its value of £6.98 per code.
If you want to know more about this really great way to have your own personal guided walking tour, then head over to Pandemic Tours App
