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So you’ve planned that perfect vacation. You’ve taken time off from work, booked plane tickets at the perfect price, booked a great hotel and even plotted out a general itinerary based on known locals, but something is still missing – A great time! Really taking in and experiencing the ins and outs of a place foreign to you is not an easy task. Most of the time, the places everyone visits is based on feedback and advertising. Mystery Trip by Sellanapp promises to take the pressure off by allowing you to generate trip itineraries with just one tap. Turning ordinary trips into wonderful adventures, the app will even allow you to challenge friends by creating treasure hunt style games with check in/checkpoints, pic proof requests and guessing games to boot.

Uncovering The Mystery

Mystery Trip has two purposes. The first is to generate trips with random (known) destinations within any area. The second is to challenge your friends by making them visit places that you have chosen yourself. You can leave clues for them to find those places, drop hints and set up checkpoints. The app revolves around the Mystery Token. To select a trip created by friends, you spend some of these tokens. To create trips, you spend some of these tokens. The app comes with 150 starter tokens for you to test things out. More tokens can be had by way of in-app purchases.

Getting Around

Navigating the app is easy. The bottom strip contains several icons. “Home” has a list of user generated trips from which any can be chosen. Trips can be setup by tapping on “Generate Mystery Trip”, which is at the bottom of the Home screen. Every trip has a rating from one to give stars. Any mystery trips you create yourself is also stored on the list. “News” will display relevant news. If anyone joins the service including you, this action will show up as a news item in the list. “Balance” shows the amount of “Mystery Tokens” you have remaining. More Mystery Tokens can be purchased here. The best value is the $4.99 purchase of 2500 tokens. Most actions require 50-75 tokens, so this will keep you going for quite some time.

“Favorites” will allow you to store favorite trips. “More” displays Profile info, and gives Help access.

In Practice

After you generate or choose a Mystery trip, the fun begins. You have access to maps. You generally have no idea how many destinations are on each trip, but going on an Easter Egg hunt with clues can be very fun if you are really trying to discover off beat places. You can really get know the ins and outs of a location and maybe experience it as a local would. Be careful with skipping destinations however. Skipping over a destination and checkpoint will subtract tokens from your balance. The point is to truthfully visit every plot in a mystery trip. If you are generating the trip yourself, you will obviously know the destination, but your friends won’t!

The app is a Social Network. You can add and delete friends, and challenge friends as mentioned earlier. We think the best case scenario would be to add your trip partners, or real life friends (co-workers, etc) and either generate trips when on vacation for added fun, or set up scenarios where you make colleagues follow your destinations to experiences places the way you did. The applications are endless.

Verdict

Mystery App has competitors, but prides itself on having more to offer. The apps interface could be improved in some ways. We would like to see “My Profile” and “Generate Mystery Trip” accessible via a dedicated icon, ads included as a dynamic banner and have users start off with a much larger token balance if the app is going to be centered around token usage. This will get users generating more trips from the get-go which will of course encourage more users to join, and give users more examples of what could be done. Mystery Trip has a lot of potential and offers a lot in its current state. We would also like to see a decidated tutorial. At the least, if you had a day where you had nothing to do in your own city, the app could help you discover things that you may have overlooked. Whether you are in New York or Moscow, Mystery Trip will have something for you and add excitement to what would otherwise be an ordinary experience.

GMA