Quick review: traveling smart with Radar, Yahoo’s new iPhone app for planning trips

Yahoo Radar 1.0 for iOS iPhone screenshot 001

Yahoo today released a brand new mobile application for planning trips, Radar for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. The app is available at no charge in the App Store and includes a smart chat bot that you can interact with. Using data from a number of popular third-party services, like Yelp and TripAdvisor, Radar delivers personalized recommendations of sights to see, activities and restaurants in an attractively designed mobile user interface.

After using it briefly, I can safely say that Radar is one of the best mobile apps Yahoo has published in a while.

Exploring US cities with Radar

Exploring US cities is a breeze with Radar for iPhone.

Whether you’re planning a trip or want to try something different in your hometown, Radar brings you premium results gleaned from trusted sources across the web. Third-party data is combined with Yahoo’s expertise in search, communications and content, allowing for a seamless experience.

In addition to Yahoo Mail, Radar supports other email providers, including Gmail and Outlook.com. After signing in with an email account, Radar will set you up in no time by analyzing all the upcoming flight, hotel and rental car confirmation receipts in your inbox.

Yahoo Radar 1.0 for iOS iPhone screenshot 002

But don’t worry, you can use the app even if you don’t have any confirmation receipts in your inbox: just answer a few questions asked by the bot by tapping various bubbles at the bottom of the screen to tell the app about the locations you’re interested in.

Personalized recommendations

This will help Radar tailor recommendations to your liking, from must-see sights to the best restaurants in town. For those wondering, Radar includes recommendations in the “Sights to see” and “Places to eat” sections for 16,000 cities in the United States.

Recommendations can be filtered based on your preferences and month of travel and you can explore tips from travelers who have already been there.

It’s nice that you can create your own bucket list of the best restaurants and places to see, see your trip itineraries, including flights, hotels and rental car reservations, and get alerted of flight delays, gate changes, flight cancellations and check-in reminders.

It’s a wrap-up

In my brief hands-on time with Radar, I was able to interact with the built-in chat bot to explore a few interesting places in the United States. I also checked out a few nice restaurants in Las Vegas and got recommendations for appropriate activities.

Summing up, Radar is a cool app with nicely laid out presentation, rich data sets and useful features that you’ll enjoy using for planning trips, research and exploring interesting places in the US.

Pricing and availability

Radar requires an iPhone, iPod touch and iPad with iOS 8.0 or later. At the time of this writing, the app was limited to people in the United States, but international readers can easily run Radar by setting their device’s regional settings to United States, or create a US App Store account to download Radar.

Grab Radar for free on the App Store.