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Every trip starts on the couch. Kristjan and I will be sitting at home on a random Tuesday evening, laptops open, and one of us will pull up Google Maps and start scrolling. Not searching for anything specific. Just... scrolling. Zooming into random corners of the world. "What about here?" "Ooh, look at this coastline." "Wait, I've always wanted to go to Rome."
And just like that, we have a destination.
The Couch Research Phase
Once we land on a city, we do a quick sanity check. We open City Buddy and look at the basics: when is the best time to visit? What's the weather going to be like? What are the top things to see? This is the brief version, the "are we actually doing this?" phase.
For Rome, it took us about ten minutes. We scrolled through the attraction list, saw the Colosseum, the Vatican, Trastevere, the Pantheon, and thought: yes, we're doing this. We checked the weather section and picked a month that wouldn't be unbearably hot or packed with summer tourists. Done. Flights booked, accommodation sorted, and we moved on with our week.
That's the beauty of having everything in one place. No opening fifteen tabs, no reading three different blog posts that all recommend different things. Just one clean list with ratings and a quick overview.
Then You Land, and It's Chaos
Here's the thing nobody tells you about travel: the moment you step out of the airport, everything you calmly planned on your couch goes out the window. Suddenly you're navigating a foreign metro system, your phone is on 40%, you're hungry, and the city is loud and alive and overwhelming in the best possible way.
This is where City Buddy actually shines for us. Not during the planning phase at home, but right there on the ground, when we need to make quick decisions.
We open the attraction list. Each place has a "Directions" button that takes you straight to Google Maps. No typing, no searching, no trying to spell "Piazza Navona" correctly in a maps app. Just tap and go. It sounds small, but when you're standing at a street corner trying to figure out where to walk next, it saves so much time and frustration.
The Perfect Amount of Information
One thing I really love is the quick facts for each attraction. It's not a Wikipedia article. It's not a 2,000-word history lesson. It's two or three sentences that tell you what you need to know. Just enough so that when you're standing in front of the Pantheon, you can say something like "this was built almost 2,000 years ago and that dome is still the world's largest unreinforced concrete dome" and actually sound like you know what you're talking about.
Kristjan and I do this constantly. We'll be walking toward an attraction and one of us will read out the quick facts. It becomes part of the experience. You remember these little details forever, and you share them with friends when they ask about your trip. It's the perfect amount, not so much that your eyes glaze over, but enough to actually appreciate what you're looking at.
No More Googling for Tickets
This one is huge for us. Every attraction on City Buddy has direct links to book tours and tickets. Before we had this, our routine was painful: arrive at an attraction, see a massive queue, pull out the phone, google "Colosseum skip the line tickets", scroll past ads and sketchy reseller sites, compare prices, and by the time you've booked something you've wasted twenty minutes standing on a hot sidewalk.
Now we just tap the ticket link right there on the attraction card. It takes you straight to the booking page. No searching, no comparing, no guessing which site is legit. This alone has saved us probably hours across all our trips.
The Photo Tells You What to Expect
Another small thing that makes a big difference: each attraction has a photo. When you're deciding between three places and you only have time for two, seeing what each one actually looks like helps so much. The star rating and review count are right there too, so if something has 4.8 stars from 50,000 reviews, you know it's probably worth the detour. And if something has 3.2 stars, maybe you skip it and go get gelato instead.
The Bus Ride Game
My absolute favorite part of using City Buddy during a trip is something that has nothing to do with attractions at all. It's the useful information section.
Every city has this section filled with local stats and facts. Cost of living, safety scores, local dishes, cultural details, and random but fascinating data. And we've turned reading these into a sort of travel game.
Picture this: we're on a bus crossing Rome, it's our second day, and I'm scrolling through the useful information section. "Did you know that in Italy they consume about 45 liters of wine per person per year?!" Kristjan laughs. "That explains the wine with lunch thing." Then he grabs my phone: "Wait, look at this, the average espresso costs less than a euro." And suddenly we're having this fun conversation about Italian culture, all sparked by a few data points on a screen.
When friends join our trips, this gets even better. Everyone starts pulling out random facts and it becomes this silly, entertaining thing we do on every bus ride, every train, every waiting-in-line moment. "Did you know the tap water here is safe to drink?" "Did you know this city has a walkability score of 9 out of 10?" It turns dead time into something genuinely fun.
It's Our Travel Companion
Looking back, City Buddy has become part of how we travel. It's there when we're daydreaming on the couch, scrolling Google Maps and picking our next adventure. It's there when we land and need a quick plan. It's there when we're standing at a street corner deciding where to go next. And it's there on the bus, making us laugh with random facts about wine consumption.
We didn't build City Buddy to replace travel planning. We built it because we wanted something simple that works at every stage of a trip, from that first "what about Rome?" moment on the couch to the last bus ride back to the airport.
If any of this sounds like how you travel too, give it a try. Just type a city name and see what comes up. That's all it takes.