Rick Steves Audio Europe™ app good for
We have always found Ricks guidebooks to be tremendously helpful and tried using the podcasts on Europe from him via iTunes when we went to Italy. Whereas I enjoy reading the paper format guidebooks the podcasts were truly great! As we walked through places such as the Forum and the Colosseum, we just put our earphones on and off we went. It was as if Rick was with us! Now that the podcasts have been put together into an App it makes it even more convenient to obtain the guides. Thank you for doing this Rick and team! You make travels to Europe easy and enjoyable.
What a great idea for an app - Rick Steves program is super high quality and well produced. Expect nothing less from this app.
First, this is a remarkable app as you can upload Ricks podcasts right into the app, some of these are for tours, self guided tours, and then there are some radio-casts. The potential of this app is great - I see so much potential eg: link to the eiffel tower ticket web page etc.
I loved listening to these clips. They were very helpful for planning our trip to Europe! :)
Thanks Rick!! Its incredible that this set of audio guides are free! We used all your tours for Rome, Venice and Florence. My wife and I used one iPod connected to a headphone splitter for the tours. Its amazing how many people are actually using the same audio guide at the same time. You can recognize them by their iPods, headphones (with splitters), and the Rick Steves guide maps. Of course, you will see a few tourist hovering one unnoticeable item and marvel at it that other tourists dont even care to see!
The instructions in the audio guide are very clear, you know exactly when to pause and start again. Also, the photos associated with each chapter really help for finding what to look at.
With these audio guides, I truly feel like a traveller rather than a tourist only wanting to see postcard sights. I will definitely use the audio guides for other countries!
A little hint, we listened to the audio guide once before entering the site (you will have plenty of time in the line up), then restart it once we got in. This helped us not to miss anything.
Just came back from a great visit in Rome. I dont want to be holding a guide book while I explore these historical sites so my strategy was to used this as an addition to the guide book. I read the guide books the night before a visit and use the app when on site. I used it for Ostia Antica, the Pantheon and the Collosseum.
Some bad moments
If you can actually get the walking tours to download, then this app is great, and they are a great alternative to paying for audio guides. However, it takes at least an hour for one track to download, and the app has to remain open the whole time, or it stops downloading. You cant even let your phone go to sleep. I also had a lot of problems with just getting tracks to download. Numerous times they just "failed" or the app would crash when I opened them.
This would be an excellent resource if it were not so terribly slow. The audio guides are great, but take forever to download - especially over wifi in Europe, where I suspect a lot of downloading occurs.
I also have noticed some random crashing. Id like to see this work in the background for downloading too.
Id happily pay for higher speed downloads, but alas my time in Europe is almost up.
App is not opening and crashing immediately. Would like to actually be able to see the new features.
When I download this app Im told that the tours will but all that is on the app are interviews. I can go to podcasts in a separate app and download the podcast tours that way. But disappointed that theyre not available on this app
The content is everything youd expect. The app experience, however, is very poor. You cant pause or resume the app from the control center, lock screen or from head phones. To make matters worse if you switch to the camera app it doesnt keep track of which audio track you were listening to so you have to pick it out again. Disappointing user experience.
This is a review for the app only ( content has always been great). The app was basic and functional... now you made it so much harder to use, especially after removing the feature to download all tracks of a playlist at once.
Also after the update, I had to re-download all my tracks again.
