Travel Guides
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Travel Guides is a paid feature of the OsmAnd app.
Overview
Virtual travel guides inside OsmAnd offer valuable insights, recommendations, and tips for users. They also allow tourists to access comprehensive navigation information to attractions directly within the app.
OsmAnd travel guides are based on data from Wikivoyage, a community project similar to Wikipedia, where volunteer writers create up-to-date articles.
Wikivoyage information includes the main facts about a place, transport, landmarks, shopping spots, etc.
How to use
- Download Travel guides.
- Browse articles about a country, region, city, attractions.
- Alternatively display travel guides articles and / or points on the map using Configure map menu.
- Browse through attractions on the map, add them to Map markers or Favorites.
- Using Read full button go to the Article inside Travel guides*.
- Bookmark articles to read them later.
- Chose points from articles to visit and add them to the OsmAnd map.
- Get more information about places to visit from offline wikipedia articles.
- Build a route to chosen touristic attractions.
Travel guides articles are stored inside OsmAnd in form of GPX tracks with Waypoints. After adding these tracks to the map (see Points or Travel routes sections of this article), you can manage them via My Places menu.
Download articles
Before you start using travel guides, you need to download them via the Download map menu (Menu → Download maps → Travel guides). Articles are grouped by regions: Africa, Asia, Australia and Oceania, Central America, Europe, North America, Russia, and South America, so you don't need to download travel books for a separate city or country.
After the necessary regions are saved on your device, you can browse through articles using OsmAnd, even if you're abroad or out of a mobile network area!
Besides the country, region or city guides, you can also find guides to the sites from movies, books, computer games, as well as places of memory of great people, etc.
There are special guides like the list of UNESCO Global Geoparks Network or the list of the world's largest and most complicated international airports.
Browse Articles
The Travel guides screen consists of two general parts: the search field and the travel guides list with two tabs: Explore and Bookmarked articles. By single tap on a tab, you can switch between them.
When you open Travel Guides (Menu → Travel guides), OsmAnd will show you articles about interesting places located near the geographic coordinates of the current center of the map. Tap on the item from the list opens the Travel guide article. At the bottom of the screen is a switch to the Bookmarks tab.
Explore and Bookmark
On the Explore tab (or Popular destinations) are listed 30 first articles about destinations adjacent to the center of the screen (not the location). By touching the field with the title and a short description of the article, you can view its full text.
If you tap the Bookmark button, the article will be saved for reading later and can be accessed in the Bookmarks tab. In the Bookmarked Articles tab, articles are arranged as they are saved. The newest ones are at the top.
- Read - opens Travel guide article.
- Bookmark - moves chosen article to Bookmarked articles.
- Remove - removes chosen article from Bookmarked articles.
Search
Search field is located at the top of the Travel guides screen. If you start typing the first letters of a country, city, or famous place, a list of articles will appear under the search field. By touching the needed one, you can start reading.
Next to each search result are listed the first 3 most commonly used languages in which the selected article can be read. However, popular articles are available in many more languages than the 3 listed.
- You can search for some Cultural attractions (for example Harry potter tourism, Ghost towns, Monarchies, etc.).
- To delete the search history you need to use Options button.
Options
In this menu you can customize the appearance of articles when working offline. Note, that downloaded travel guides do not contain images. They appear only when viewing articles with an active Internet connection.
In the Options menu, you can choose whether or not to save pictures in the articles you've viewed so that you can use them when you are offline. You can also clear images cash or delete search history (works only with search inside Travel guides).
- Download images - images within articles can be downloaded for offline use.
- Image cache - clears the images cache to free up memory.
- Delete search history - clears search history.
Travel Article
You can open an article from the proposed variants on the Explore tab or using the Search option. If you have added touristic attractions, called Points from Travel guide article to the OsmAnd map, you can also open an article using Read full button in a waypoint description section.
The following controls are located at the top of the screen:
- A switch to change language of an article. The language can be selected from the available options.The system language is used by default.
- Using ⋮ button you can share article with friends. The link opens in the OsmAnd app (apropriate travel guides file should be downloaded on the recipient device) or Wikivoyage site (if recipient doesn't have the OsmAnd app or for iOS devices).
- Tap on a navigation panel opens Travel guides Navigation menu.
At the bottom of the screen there are buttons:
- Contents - opens table of contents of the article.
- Points - shows the tourist attractions related to the article on the map.
- Bookmark - allows you to add an article to bookmarks for later reading.
Navigation menu
To move between Travel guide articles, use the Navigation menu. You can access it by clicking on the address field above the image. Note, that articles in the Travel Guides are grouped as follows: Continent - Region - Country - Province (region) - City. If you tap the arrow in the left top corner of the screen, you will go straight to the Explore or Bookmarked articles tab (depending on which tab was opened earlier).
Table of contents
Most Travel guide articles have the same content structure, with an introduction (images and a description of the tourist site) and subsequent chapters:
- Understand - details about local culture and habits.
- Get in - how to get to the area, places, etc., and how much will this route cost.
- See - a list of attractions (museums, historical sites...) with full descriptions: ticket prices, working hours, useful links, phone numbers.
- Do - places to spend time.
- Buy - sites to shop.
- Eat - catering facilities (divided by budget: budget, mid-range, splurge).
- Drink - bars and cafes.
- Sleep - accommodations divided by budget (budget, mid-range, splurge).
- Go next - closest places from Wikivoyage.
Points
Travel guide articles often contain tourist attractions grouped by topic. By single tap on a Points button at the bottom of the Article, all attractions related to the topic (eating places, accommodation options, airports, shops, historical monuments, etc.) will be added to the map and can be managed as a Track.
Attraction groups are marked by default with a certain icons: Eat and Drink categories with knife and fork in a red circle, Do and See with photocamera in a green circle, etc. You can manage points groups using ⋮ like a Waypoint folder.
Travel articles points refer to waypoints of a GPX track.
You can also add points to the map in Configure map menu. You can either show them all or select a specific category to display.
Travel routes
The alternative vay to browse Travel guides is to display them on the map using Configure map menu (Menu → Configure map → Travel routes).
Travel routes and articles on the map
After you turn on displaying Travel routes in the Configure map menu, you will see multicolor circles on the map. Orange ones are for route tracks, route articles, and some of their waypoints. If you tap on a specific route, article, or point and then press Download button (⍗), you will be able to manage it as a track.
Manage as GPX Track
After you have added Travel guides to the map, Travel articles can be saved as GPX track and managed via My places menu (Menu → My Places → Tracks → Travel): they can be displayed on the map, shared, renamed, put into another folder, exported or deleted.
- In Overview, you can read short description or open Travel guide article by tap Read full button. Edit allows you to correct article.
- There is no information in Track section (Travel guides GPX files contain only waypoints).
- Under Points you see folders with points grouped by name (Buy, Do, Drink, etc.).
- The Option button performs the same functions as in the regular track.
Points are stored in a GPX-file (a commonly used format for tracks) as Waypoints. The number of points (waypoints) that the track contains is marked next to the icon 🚩 in the track field.
In Track Context menu of a GPX-file, you can find general information from article to which this track belongs.
Combine with Wikipedia
In Travel guides articles you can find useful information about tourist attractions (contact information, web links, prices, etc.). Many articles have button Wikipedia, that allows to open Wikipedia article (online or offline) about place of interest.
In some cases in Bookmarks tab OsmAnd will suggest to download Wikipedia map layer, so you can browse related articles offline.
Please note, that the Wikipedia plugin is a paid feature of the OsmAnd app.
Custom Travel guides
We recommend to add new articles or edit them on Wikivoyage. About every 6 months we update Travel guides and you can download new articles. You can also create your own Travel book. How to make it is described in tecnical documentation (see Create custom Travel guide article).