MyTravelr review

Dave Oliver

We review MyTravelr, an international travel tool

Published on Nov 10, 2009

MyTravelr is designed to offer a clutch of tools to help you when you're travelling - including times, currencies, telephone dialling codes and local weather– whether you're a business frequent flyer or just off on your hols.

When you first fire it up you'll be asked for your home destination and to select the nearest city from a drop-down menu of over 1,000. From then on, all info, including international times and currency conversion info is calculated relative to your home city.

It's quite cleverly laid out, with five separate time zones, including your own, crammed on to the home page. Icons are small so you'll really need a stylus to get at them all, but each zone includes analogue and digital clocks, weather and local info (day length, sunrise, sunset, map coordinates etc). You can easily change each zone simply by clicking on the city name.

At the top is a tool bar allowing you to flick between your zones' clocks (which incidentally factor in daylight saving times around the globe), weather (with five-day forecasts for each of your chosen cities), daylight map (which let's you see at a glance which areas of the globe are in daylight and which in darkness), currencies and additional tools.

These include a packing checklist with hundreds of items you can set for yourself to check off before you travel, clothes size conversion tables, international (and US local, but not UK, grrr) dialling codes and a conversion tool for lengths, weights, speeds and a variety of other measures.

There are 180 different currencies to choose from, and we found the conversion to be generally accurate so long as we had an internet connection and remembered to press the update button.

There's also plenty of scope for tweaking the interface, with a selection of skins available for download, plus the ability to tweak colours and themes yourself.

Usefully, MyTravelr also features a Today page plug-in that you can toggle on or off. It shows the time zones of up to five cities (you can choose a lower number if you want to save space) as well as displaying currency exchange info – very handy for quick reference.

MyTravelr offers a very decent group of useful tools and info for travellers, with plenty of top-line info that's easy to access, and doesn't overburden you with too much clutter. Considering it's free, it's an excellent, easy-to-use travel tool.