San Francisco is the birthplace of high technologies. From Silicon Valley to Auckland Tech Laboratories, the San Francisco Bay Area is the largest center for high-tech innovations. Netfix, Twitter, Apple, StumbleUpon, Dropbox, Pinterest, and many other projects began their triumphal march across the planet from this corner of northern California. Therefore, it’s not surprising that San Francisco has become the home of a number of companies that change the world of travel! Here are 7 interesting online services designed for tourists…
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Uber
When choosing a way of traveling, many tourists prefer the car, rather than public transport. However, just a couple of decades ago, it was simply impossible to rent a car from Hertz at Hillsboro Airport or quickly find a taxi in San Francisco.
Thus, Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick decided to solve this problem – they have developed an application where users can find and order the nearest taxi, and even track its arrival by using GPS. The Personal Driver for Everyone service has since changed a lot for the better, and at the same time it has indicated a new direction for the development of taxi services all over the world. Currently, there are several service levels available. So, the cheapest, UberX service, in most cases costs 20-50% cheaper than a regular taxi. After each trip, the taxi driver and passengers give each other marks on a five-point scale. If the driver falls in the rating to 4.5 stars, he has a chance of being fired, and passengers with a bad rating will have to wait a long time until someone agrees to pick them up.
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HotelTonight
Since its launch in 2011, HotelTonight application has been downloaded by users over ten million times. The database of the application keeps the cities throughout the United States and Europe. Every day fresh offers of hotel rooms with discounts get into the base. Prices vary, but usually they are at least twenty percent cheaper. In addition to the convenience of the interface, users will certainly appreciate the dividing of hotel property by quality, ranging from budget proposals and ending with five-star and design hotels, which are designated with “hip” or “luxe” inscriptions.
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FoodSpotting
FoodSpotting is positioned as a “visual guide to good food and places to find it.” With this application you can choose the establishment to have a lunch in a particular city. In addition to reviews of bars and restaurants, in FoodSpotting you have an opportunity to see the photo of the best dish. The FoodSpotting App is a kind of analogue of the Tinder, intended for finding not friends, but the best dishes. FoodSpotting’s database already has over 2.5 million records, and the number of service users continues to grow steadily.
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Peek
Peek service appeared in San Francisco just several years ago, but it already managed to win the appreciation of users, and the number of travelers interested in the program continues to grow rapidly. Oxford alumnus Ruzwana Bashir and Jack Dorsey, which is one of the founders of Twitter, created the website and its associated web application. What is a Peek? This is a visually attractive, versatile “virtual store” where you can find hikes, excursions, surfing lessons, cooking classes, tickets for many sights and much more.
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Hipmunk
Hipmunk has become quite widely known over the four years of its existence, but this is not surprising. Nobody expected anything else from one of the founders of Reddit.
Hipmunk is a new search aggregator that collects offers from Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb and other similar services in one place. It’s possible to compare the results of the search according to different criteria, for example, to compare several flights or several offers of hotels in a selected city. Also, intuitive filters and automatically plotted charts with prices showing the dynamics of price changes over the next 90 days help to simplify the selection. If you register on the Hipmunk website, you can save the search results on your computer or gadget. The results are stored on any device in cross-platform form and don’t depend on the operating system.
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Airbnb
Airbnb is a success story that many developers are trying to repeat without success. On the site of the service, anyone can offer to rent a free room in their home, house or apartment. Payment is made confidentially through the Airbnb website interface. Viewing photos of a particular property offered for rent is a bit like an “excursion” through the pages of the social Internet service Pinterest.
You can find real suites with a stylish interior, a free Internet tablet, beautiful views and excellent furnishing for the price which is usually less than the cost of a hotel room.
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Jetpac
Although Jetpac appeared in 2011, its popularity began to grow dramatically after launching a web application with guidebooks to more than six thousand cities around the world. Algorithms Jetpac analyze photos from Instagram, and then select lists of the best images for each city in different categories. For example, it can be “ten popular wine bars.”
Unfortunately, Jetpac application version for Apple devices sometimes work incorrectly, but the creators of the service do their best to cope with all the bugs. However, the main thing is that the idea itself is just great!