Our pick of the best apps and high-tech solutions to help you find exciting events to attend and attractions to visit in your home town or the city you’ll be visiting on holiday this month.
If you want to visit the top attractions all over SA
The Tourism Radio City Guides app now features six South African areas: Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban, the Cape Winelands, PE and the West Coast. It gives you in-depth info about pretty much everything you’d want to know as a tourist in each area, including sightseeing musts, entertainment spots, scenic highlights and the best places to stay and eat. It’s GPS-based, and lets you know about nearby attractions as you approach them, so you won’t miss out on anything. It’s like having a tour guide in your pocket! A bonus of this app is that it works offline, so once you’ve downloaded it, you can use it without using any mobile data!
Download it for free on iOS.
If you’ve got kids
Forget play dates – go on organised activities with the Adventure Clubs crowd using their nifty mobile app. Suitable for parents with kids aged six months to six years old, the Adventure Clubs app lets you browse activities nearby for a range of interests that will stimulate and educate your child while they have tonnes of fun – from baking to playing sports to ziplining to crafting to visiting museums to wildlife viewing to sailing to playing music. Adventures are created by other parents just like you, which means you can create adventures too, and invite family and friends. You RSVP through the app and can then private message the other parents who will be joining. Adventure Clubs operates in Cape Town and Johannesburg.
View the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpiccoinGv8. Download for iOS and Android.
If you’re visiting Cape Town
The iVenture Card is not an app, but it is brand new and it is cutting edge – and, importantly, it’s hugely helpful. Before you visit the Mother City, make sure to buy an iVenture Card for you and your family. This brand-new initiative from the City of Cape Town works as a smart card that you pay for upfront to get free entry to over 60 of the city’s top attractions and hidden gems. You’ll save up to 40% on entry fees, often get to skip queues with fast-track entry, and can choose whether to swipe for free entry or to redeem a benefit, such as a free cocktail at Café Caprice in Camps Bay, or a discount at a restaurant.
There are a number of pricing options you can choose, depending on how long you’ll be staying, how many tourist attractions you want to visit, and the amount of cash you’d like to spend. You pay upfront, and then your iVenture Card is loaded and ready to get you into any of the attractions you fancy. The Flexi Pass lets you visit three, five or seven attractions; the Unlimited Pass is valid for a certain number of days and lets you visit as many hot spots as you can in that time; and the Unlimited Premium Pass lets you add one ‘premium experience’ to your stay, such as a Cape Town Helicopters Atlantico Tour or Marine Dynamics shark cage diving.
Find out more about the iVenture City Pass here.
If you’re staying home or visiting family in Gauteng
We all know that we get lazy in our home town. We hardly ever go to new places and rarely stray out of our comfort zone. But the Gauteng Travel Guide app is here to remedy that. It gives you the lowdown on more than 380 points of interest across Gauteng, including museums, nature reserves, art galleries, shops, restaurants, extreme sports and cultural hotspots. It’s got a built-in search and category filter functionality, plus detailed maps of areas around Gauteng to help you find your way. It also lets you update your social media profiles directly from the app, so you can keep your friends in the loop.
If you are on always on the lookout for cool events near you
This may come as a surprising suggestion, but it shouldn’t, considering that this app knows more about you than all the others combined. That’s right – Facebook. They recently jacked up their Events section so that you can find events that are a) near you, b) in the near future, and c) chosen especially for you and your preferences.
You can now specify if you’re looking for something to do today, tomorrow, this weekend or next week. There’s also a Suggested For You section, based on all of Facebook’s data about where and how you live, and who you know. The recommendations will come to you even if nobody you know is going, if nobody invited you, and even if you’ve never been to the venue. Updates like these are set to turn Facebook into a local events-discovery app, which, for now, are quite few and far between, especially in South Africa.
What we love most about the latest version of Events is that you can get reminders about an event without committing to go, with the handy ‘Interested’ button. It’s perfect for the commitment-phobic – and Capetonians – among us.
If you haven’t already, download the latest version of the Facebook app for iOS and Android
Note that while these apps may be free to download, the data to do so is not. Buy data bundles quickly, simply and affordably by logging into My Vodacom »
