iPhone Apps for Venice Travel

Venice is one of the most popular cities in Italy to visit, and it also happens to be a city that can be challenging to love. It’s often crowded, and it’s expensive even in the off-season. Good food isn’t always easy to find, whereas bad food is. Still, I love Venice – and I’m always happy when I find a new way to help people enjoy their trips to the canal city.

In an article a couple months ago, I listed some of the iPhone apps for Italy travel that I’d found in the app store. This time, I’m going to focus just on iPhone travel apps for Venice – and there are some pretty cool ones.

>> I’m not including any general Italian language apps or phrasebooks here – they’re on the main Italy travel iPhone apps article, so check over there for apps to help you get over the language barrier.

Venice Travel iPhone Apps

Venice Travel Guide
$5.99
This is a Venice city guide in the mTrip series of city guides (the other Italy city they offer is Rome), and it functions on a couple of levels. It can work like a travel guidebook – it has all the listings of the things you’d need information about (attractions, hotels, restaurants, etc.) – but it’ll also plan your itinerary for you if you like. You can use the “mTrip Genius” when you first open the app – put in your trip dates, customize your trip preferences on the slider bars for things like museums, monuments, and parks, and tell the app what kind of trip “intensity” you’d like to have. The app will then produce a daily itinerary for you, complete with the amount of time it takes to get from sight to sight and a route to follow. You can edit the itinerary when it’s complete, to remove or add things. Other features of the app include a “favorites” button (you can save places to your list to find them more easily later), a currency converter (under the “more” button), and general information about the city (including tips for visiting with kids).
Note: I was given a code to try this app for free, but my opinions are my own.

Occhio Go Venezia
$3.99
Written entirely by one Venice enthusiast after 10 years of visiting the city, this Venice guide includes not only the usual sorts of listings for attractions, restaurants, bars, and shopping, it also has information on travel necessities (WiFi hotspots, laundromats, grocery stores). It’s available completely offline and there are detailed walking directions from place to place, not just maps you need to navigate.

Venice 2Go
$0.99
This Venice guide has a city map that’s available completely offline and is searchable, and it also includes more than 170 articles (each one with photos) on various points of interest around the city (history, attractions, etc.).

Venice City Travel Guide
$4.99
There are a couple things about this app that make it appealing. First, it has maps of not just Venice but also a few of the lagoon islands and other cities in the Veneto, making it more useful if you’re planning some excursions in the region. Second, it offers itinerary suggestions for trips of different durations in Venice (1 day, 2 days, 3 days, and 5 days) to help you plan your trip. This app also has a few useful phrases with audio tracks.

Venice Street Map
$0.99
If you’re just looking for a more stripped-down map of Venice without much “guide” stuff along with it, then this app might be a good option. It’s available completely offline, and does have markers for things like major attractions.

Venice Restaurants Official Mobile Guide
$1.99
Since Venice is notorious for bad food, this might be the most useful app on this list. It says it’s the “most complete” listing of restaurants, bars, cafes, and other eateries in Venice and the Veneto region, and even has information on the different kinds of cuisine you’ll find throughout the region. The app has maps with restaurant locations and prices listed.

Tap Venice Eating
$2.99
This app comes from the recommendation of a reader, Jill, who was kind enough to leave a comment on this post when it first went up to say that she’s used the Tap Venice Eating app “extensively.” Jill says it’s the mobile app equivalent for Michela Scibilia’s restaurant guide, and “contains all of the information in her very useful Venice Osterie guide.” It’s available completely offline, and features listings for more than 130 places in and around Venice as well as the ability to pick a restaurant based on a variety of factors (restaurants with a seafood specialty, places that are good to take kids, eateries that are open late). Thanks for the tip, Jill!

Lonely Planet City Guide: Venice
$15.99 (on sale right now for $5.99)
If you like Lonely Planet guidebooks, you’ll like the iPhone app versions. They’re crammed with all the same kind of information you find in the books, which makes them a little cumbersome to navigate, but if you get familiar with how to find what you’re looking for before you arrive in Venice you’ll be fine.

iVenice
$1.99
This specialized app is solely to assist with getting around in Venice – it’s got all the vaporetto lines listed, along with their routes and their landings.

Venice Giracittà
$5.99
Of the three audio guide apps listed here, this one has the most total audio track time – more than 4 hours, spread over 18 different audio guides. There’s an interactive map function (uses GPS) so you know if you’re getting off-track, and more than 200 photos to accompany the audio guides.

Venice Touristic Audio Guide
$4.99
This audio guide app includes tours of, as it says, the “50 most interesting places” in Venice. There’s more than 2.5 hours worth of audio, and the app includes a map that’s available completely offline.

Venice: The Floating City
$4.99
This audio guide app has only one audio guide, but it’s essentially a walking tour of the biggest attractions in the city. It’s a 1.5-hour tour.