Long before Jestsetter or Brangelina, there was Mr. and Mrs. Smith, a trusted travel publisher and boutique hotel booking service based in London, UK. It’s not your average travel company. Mr. and Mrs. Smith is the epitome of cool. Since its launch in 2003, it’s released four Something for the Weekend compilation albums of chill-out travel music. Its collection includes 850 boutique hotels worldwide, which can be found in the Plan section of the app.
Open the app, select your gender, location and currency. The app shows prices in dollars, pounds, euros and Australian dollars. Then the app prompts you to Plan or Play.
Plan includes hotel search, location search by maps, latest hotel offers and favourites. The maps feature still has a few kinks to work out. Such as, why show me information about Koh Samui in Thailand if you aren’t going to offer me a hotel to stay there? Classic hotel search also has a ways to go. No hotels in Argentina? Greece? I know the site has plenty of options. The app is also buggy and crashed on me a few times while I searched for hotels. The latest offers feature worked really well. 5 nights stay in Phuket at 15% off is a pretty good deal. But I can only see one photo of the hotel within the app, which is a bummer.
Booking can kind of be done in the app. Once you hit book it takes you a mobile version of the site within the app so you have to zoom in and pinch and all of that annoying business. I recommend the handy call button, which rests in the top right corner, allowing you to instantly dial Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s 24 hour travel team at any time.
Play is the best part of this app, and by far the most unique section. “Truth or Dare” is the digital version of the old school game. Select Naughty or Nice and then shake your phone. DARE: Allow your partner to shave a part of your body. Meh. DARE: Order a meal from room service and serve it to your partner- on your body. Tip: Don’t order chicken Alfredo. DARE: Allow your partner to take a saucy picture of you- and post it on the Internet. I give up. None of these are naughty enough.
How To includes tips like: How to pack the perfect picnic; an extremely helpful How to speak the lingo for Spanish, Italian, French, German, Swedish, Estonian, Dutch, Czech; How to mix a minibar cocktail; How to play strip poker; and How to play Boules: Cunningly.
Get out of work is full of little white lies that include email templates and the ability to edit and send from within the app. pick an email template edit and send. Zee would so not fall for any of these.
The last element in play is TuneSmith, which creates a seductive soundtrack using your iTunes library to the backdrop of digital candles. The first track it picked was “Talkin’ Bout Hey Love” by Gunnie. Ace. This app might not be great for booking or searching for hotels but the play section is where it’s at and hopefully Mr. and Mrs. S can sort out the booking part and hire a new designer. Because for traveling on the go, it has potential. On a side note, I need to know about more apps with play sections.
Download Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s Plan and Play iOS app here (Free).
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