Discover your destination with Lonely Planet Guides: A new, free app to get you to the heart of a city on your phone

Lonely Planet is excited to announce the launch today of Guides, the latest offering from the world’s leading travel media company. Guides is a new, free, city guide mobile app - the perfect pocket travel companion when on the road, or when planning a trip. Available now for both iOS and Android, Guides will get you straight to the heart of a destination on your phone.

Guides is easy to use and meets the needs and expectations of travellers in 2016 and beyond. Guides offers Lonely Planet’s expert content, free of charge, curated and optimised to provide the best possible on-the-ground experience. Guides enables travellers to:

• Navigate with easy-to-use offline maps;
• Save places with simple bookmarking;
• Find the perfect activity with powerful filtering;
• Travel confidently with essential tips such as city highlights and details on where to eat and stay.

Guides is launching with 38 cities across six continents: Amsterdam, Bangkok, Barcelona, Beijing, Berlin, Boston, Budapest, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Chicago, Dubai, Dublin, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Kyoto, Las Vegas, London, Madrid, Montreal, Moscow, New Orleans, New York City, Paris, Prague, Rio de Janeiro City, Rome, San Francisco, Seattle, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, St Petersburg, Sydney, Tokyo, Vancouver, Venice, Vienna, and Washington, DC.

Guides includes an average of 1,000 points of interest per city and has “near-me” functionality, which shows you sights that are within easy reach of where you are, or sights that are close by to somewhere you plan on visiting.

As with all Lonely Planet products, Guides allows you to explore using Lonely Planet’s best and freshest expert-curated content. Each city guide includes sights, highlights, details on places to eat, drink and shop as well as where to stay. Guides is a trustworthy travel companion that will help you make the most of your city trip.

With plans to add more cities soon, users can search within the app for any city in Lonely Planet’s global catalogue. If there isn’t an in-app guide for that city, users can request to have it added within the app – and be notified once it’s available.

Daniel Houghton, Lonely Planet’s CEO says, “We are very excited to launch Guides for mobile. We were one of the first travel publishers ever to have content available in the App Store and were a launch partner for the iPad. We have taken the time to understand what travellers need and expect from a mobile product in 2016. Guides delivers Lonely Planet’s expertly-curated content in a format that is contextual and intuitive on mobile devices and which utilises the many great innovations of those platforms to deliver the best possible user experience.”