Road Trip Planner‪™‬ 4+

Really Good but Not As Easy As Advertised

This app can do far more than I have yet discovered & it’s ability to share information with other travel planning apps is terrific. However, many functions, like changing the order of waypoints or adding waypoints in the middle of the route or several other functions are not intuitive or all that easy to use. Buy the tool - it does a lot. But be prepared to stumble & get frustrated along the way.

The developer says they follow common iOS procedures, but that assumes the average user knows those procedures. The developer has responded to me telling me about several support tools & tutorials that can be accessed by users. While I appreciate the fact that there is help available, I just wish it’s were not so difficult to find. I oversee software development projects, so I am not a novice. Yet I hate having to play with something I pay for & hope I can figure it out or stumble over help functions. Hence the 4-star rating.

Developer Response ,

Thank you for your review. Once you start the app, tap the Info button on the top of the view (it looks like an i surrounded by a circle). From that menu select Tutorial for a short tutorial on how to use the app. Or select Support to view our Road Trip Planner user group discussion. The discussion has a lot of good info for using RTP as well as tips on using the app. From the same menu select About Road Trip Planner to view some useful info on how to use the app. Tap the Web Site link within this view for a mulit-page user's manual on the app. If you need more info than that on how to use the app please let us know.

Forever now our road trip companion

An old friend and I started a Holiday road trip tradition this past year that honestly changed our lives. A major factor in its success we realized was the seamless nature in which we were able to use technology to help guide us toward the things we wanted to see, yet leave the ability jump around based on how we felt at any given moment. This app was a key factor in allowing us to check off the must sees, move around the stuff we realized we didn’t have time for, and keep moving forward without any feeling of being stuck or wondering what to do next. This app will be the third wheel in all of our road trips (for which we have 3 files already in the works) to come! A very special thanks to the creators for making such a relevant platform for people who like to wing it with at least some idea of what to see along the way.
This app still gives you the feeling of rolling out that paper map and pointing at spots of interest, then just does all of the hard annoying work of discovering the route.
My only suggestion would be to include a real time Navi section at which point we’d never have to switch between this and waze, and if possible nudge us to check the gas tank after that feeling of relief to finally see the light of dawn after pulling out of an 8 hour overnight winter rainstorm through the hills of West Virginia, thank god for AAA.
Oh, and make it compatible with the new IPad keyboard.

Does what I want it to do

I wanted a route planner for my car club. I wanted to create nice driving roads and put them in order of the best route. After finding RTP I built a nice route and opened the POI up in Google maps and was able to get guided directions. Great job. The fact that I can get estimated times of each route makes deciding so much better. I can decide if I want the 2 hour tour or the 3 hour tour.
One drawback is that GoogleMaps will only allow me to make routes with 25 or less POIs. But after thinking about it I think that’s ok, meaning that all I need to do is create another route where the other left off at 25. This way I can divide routes up or start on a different route anytime.
I know there’s a ton more that this app can do, I’ve only scratched the surface. Adding pictures or saving as a GPX file to open in a standalone GPS unit. (Not sure why unless my phone loses signal or whatever). But there looks like a lot more that this can do. I’ll eventually experiment and see.
Someone mentioned the lack of ease when exporting from the iOS app to Mac app. Maybe the developer can add an option that when you save to iCloud that it auto saves it for all apps. But I really don’t want that.i want to know what version I’m loading or saving, I’ll just rename different versions.
That’s all I got now

Developer Response ,

Thank you for your review. It’s always very interesting to hear how RTP is used.