A global city guide that gives people a platform to share recommendations for ‘great little places’. But can a crowd-powered listings app compete with a conventional travel guide?
GLP (Great Little Place) is a platform for discovering great independent venues in the city. Bars, restaurants, museums, it doesn’t matter – if it’s great, little, and a place, GLP has got you covered.
Great for quickly finding somewhere nearby to eat, drink and/or be merry.
All the content in GLP is user-submitted, meaning every venue suggestion has come from a real-life stranger who just wanted to share their good times with the world. Every submission is put through a “rigorous approval boot camp” by the GLP team before being added to the listings, ensuring a high quality of content.
This does mean that it will take a little while before the app has a sizable archive of recommendations – but while the app only launched in the last few weeks, the Great Little Place website has been going strong for over five years, so we trust that these guys know what they’re doing.
Swipe right for yes, left for no. Reminds us of a certain dating app…
The interface is clean, straightforward, and nicely themed. The main screen shows a stack of place cards which can be dismissed or saved into a temporary shortlist with a single swipe. You can tap a venue card for more details, or save it more permanently to your ‘black book’.
Each location has a very nice series of photos and all the basic information you might want. Tapping the address swaps in Google or Apple Maps for directions, and there are the standard contact links you would expect from a listings app. There’s no lengthy descriptions, but a short quote from a fan of the venue to give you a sense of the scene that awaits.
The quotes are short and sweet, and come from genuine unpaid enthusiasts.
GLP is a global app that covers all the obvious big cities. Don’t be disheartened if you don’t live in New York or London, though – although crowd-power doesn’t work so well for smaller towns, even at this relatively early stage there’s still a decent selection of venues in middle-sized cities.
We tested the app for the most part in TapSmart hometown Bristol, the 10th most populous city in the United Kingdom – and we can confirm that there are already a decent number of venues on show. It feels like the app has nailed many of the best haunts in town without becoming bloated with filler – and there’s nary a soulless franchise in sight. Any visitor could do a lot worse than using GLP as a tourist guidebook.
The temporary shortlist helps you keep track of potential places. A great boon for the indecisive and forgetful among us.
Though it lacks the insight of a fully-fledged guidebook from one of the big boys like Rough Guides or Lonely Planet, GLP delivers more light-hearted and personal recommendations than its competitors. If a place is in here, it must be great – and unlike a conventional guidebook, the app is almost as useful for finding hidden gems in your hometown as it is in a new location.
The archive is still a little small, but will only grow with time – and if the app really catches on we could end up with a superb collection of hand-picked venues on our hands.
There’s a fairly basic filtering option, and you can search based on current location or somewhere a bit more fanciful.
Hopefully GLP is going places. It will live or die on the strength of community submissions, but is already showing the potential to be a great little app. Oh, and it’s free – we recommend you give it a whirl.
Price: Free
Version: 1.2.3
Size: 34.9 MB
Developer: Great Little Place Ltd
The ‘Great Little Place’ app from @glpHQ lets you forgo soulless chains and find the best hidden gems in any city: http://t.co/PnDKCOFcFh
— TapSmart (@TapSmart) May 15, 2015