Homotech: Apps for Gay Travelers

Gay men love to travel, and the summer is an especially popular time to hit resorts like Rehoboth, Saugatuck, Provincetown and Fire Island. So it's also a good time to look at how, in the age of "I do everything on my phone," booking travel via mobile technology is easier than ever.

I can't remember the last time I purchased a ticket for a flight at the airline counter in an airport. It's been well over 10 years since I booked a vacation through a travel agent -- in person or otherwise. I'm guilty of it, and I'm sure you are as well: We are "connected" online through our phone or laptop computer. And for good reason: The world is quite literally, at our fingertips.

There are over 60,000 iPhone apps and the number grows each week. If there is any community getting in on all that app action it's gay men, who are notoriously early adapters to personal gadgets. While most apps allow you to play games or download silly soundboards, many travel applications are quite handy.

GayCities acts as an electronic travel guide. Using the location awareness of your iPhone the app locates gay and gay-friendly hotels, bars and restaurants in your immediate locality. If you are in New York City, but know you are continuing on to Boston, you can also manually choose Boston from the list of metro areas GayCities covers, allowing you to plan your places of interest before you land.

For you single gay boys and couples that believe that "sharing is caring," don't forget GRINDR. Let's face it; part of the fun of traveling is tasting the local cuisine if you catch my drift. With over 1 million users GRINDR also uses your phones current location to tell you who is online and signed it and how many feet or miles away they are. You can also IM each other and possibly (most likely) hook up.

Chances are, you've already downloaded GRINDR on your phone (now available on Android). So why not try the new kid on the online hook up block, GuySpy, which works in much the same way as GRINDR, but has more features.

Just looking to get around? Check out HopStop, your visiting city's transit guide. HopStop provides door-to-door subway and bus directions as well as maps for several metropolitan cities. In other words, you could stand on any corner, anywhere, and ask it for direction to places to eat, drink or sleep.

It is important to keep in mind most of these apps can be slow to load and are only as good as the phone they are downloaded on and the service they receive. Still, it is a convenient and, for the most part, reliable way to travel as you don't have to hassle with jumping on and offline to look for things.

If you are looking for a website that seems to have it all, Gogobot.com has got you covered. Gogobot is writing a new chapter in online travel where friends, not strangers, are the key to creating extraordinary travel experiences. Launched in November 2010, Gogobot helps you tap into your personal networks via Facebook and Twitter to easily get and share travel advice. Gogobot collaborates with HomeAway, Expedia, Hotels.com, Kayak and Priceline to enable users to book their vacations directly from the site.

Recently, Gogobot launched a unique feature that transforms capturing and sharing vacations, via the social graph. On July 20, Gogobot launched Travel Collections; the first of its kind. The new Collections layout allows Gogobot users to create beautiful, stylized digital scrapbooks to capture and share all aspects of their travels with friends and family.

"Our travels are important to us, creating memories that are deeply personal and rich with emotion," Travis Katz, Gogobot co-founder and CEO told EDGE. "Until today, however, people have been limited to sharing these memories through online photo albums where the images are preserved, but the context and narrative that gives them meaning is lost. Today, Gogobot takes the world beyond the photo album, launching a revolutionary digital scrapbook that allows users to curate and share all aspects of their travels, packaged into a super user-friendly interactive, crisp and clean design."

The new feature allows you to share your adventures in a format rich with color and context -- essentially, an enhanced scrapbook for the digital age. You can share photos, reviews and other details about the places they stayed, dined, and traveled from the Gogobot site. The new Collections layout also allows you to seamlessly integrate their activities from other social media sites - including their check-ins on Facebook and Foursquare, as well as professional photos from Gogobot.

All of these elements are packaged into pages about each place, allowing friends to learn more about your trip, see a map of where you were when you caught that sunset, or even make a reservation at the hotel where you stayed.

These elements are presented in a clean and elegant format with an interactive map that allows you to share vacations with your social networks in a streamlined, beautifully packaged layout, while making it easy for friends to use this information to plan their own trips.

"Why waste time uploading dozens of untagged, uncaptioned photos?" Katz asked. "Now you can share all your favorite places and memorable moments in rich detail in half the time. Gogobot's Travel Collections let you show off the most memorable moments from your trip and helps friends plan their next trip, too."

In just seven months since its public launch, Gogobot users have shared more than 600,000 destinations across the globe with their networks on Gogobot. The site won the prestigious 2010 Crunchie Award for best design, and, with more than 100,000 high-resolution images, it offers one of the richest collections of travel photos on the internet.

Shaun Knittel is an openly gay journalist and public affairs specialist living in Seattle. His work as a photographer, columnist, and reporter has appeared in newspapers and magazines throughout the Pacific Northwest. In addition to writing for EDGE, Knittel is the current Associate Editor for Seattle Gay News.

This story is part of our special report: "HomoTech". Want to read more? Here's the full list.