South African tech company Tourism Radio announces excitement over the recent purchase of the Frommer’s brand by Google

(Cape Town, South Africa) South African travel technology company Tourism Radio is pleased to hear about the recent purchase of the Frommer’s travel guidebook brand by Google, and excited about the potential this holds for mobile travellers.

An announcement about the internet giant’s latest acquisition was made by Frommer’s owner John Wiley & Sons earlier this week. Both parties declined to comment on the financial terms of the Frommer’s deal, but Tourism Radio CEO Mark Allewell says this shouldn’t be the focus. Allewell maintains, “The fact that Google are expanding on their existing travel interests means that they’re obviously committed to developing the industry, in so doing, completely changing the way we travel.”

Google bought restaurant review authority Zagat in September last year and has confirmed that Frommer’s will now be fully integrated into the team. Allewell says, “Frommer’s is one of the most trusted travel guide names in the world, and they’re the perfect addition to the Google stable.”

Tourism Radio partnered with Frommer’s in March this year to produce audio travel guides for destinations all over the world on their mobile platform. Allewell says, “At present, we’re very happy with our partnership with Frommer’s, and together we’ve produced some really quality guides for tech-savvy travellers.”

About Tourism Radio:
Founded in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2005, Tourism Radio is the brainchild of serial entrepreneur Mark Allewell. Tourism Radio provides location-based technology and travel content, and currently has offices in South Africa, New Zealand and Spain. Tourism Radio’s mobile phone application, Hummba, is a traveller’s community and travel guide shop where users can buy travel guides, create travel routes, upload picture postcards and share their travel experiences with fellow travellers.

Things to do in London after the Olympics

The spectacle that was the London 2012 Olympics is now but a fading memory, and along with the athletes, many tourists will now be heading back to their respective countries. If however you find yourself in London with a few extra days to spare, then now’s the perfect time to do a little sightseeing. In an effort to kick start your post-Olympic holiday, we’ve compiled a list of some of our favourite attractions in the city.

No visit to London would be complete without a trip to Buckingham Palace. Probably one of the world’s most well-known royal residences in the world, Buckingham’s 19 state rooms are open to the public until early October. Head over to the front gates before 11:30 in the morning and you may find a good spot to view the changing of the Queen’s Guard.

For a view of the city that simply can’t be beaten, the London Eye is the place to go. Open daily, and until about 21:00 in the summer, the London Eye is the largest observation wheel in all of Europe. Its 32, glass-sided pods make one full revolution every half hour. Grab a spot on the north side of your pod and you’re guaranteed views of the city like you’ve never seen before. More than 3,1 million people visit the London Eye each year.

If you’d rather keep your feet on terra firma, then be sure to head on over to one of the city’s many, bustling street markets. The Camden, Portobello and Greenwich Markets are favourites in this regard, and tens of thousands of tourists, and locals, visit the trio each weekend. See if you can pick up a good deal, or head over to the markets just to see what’s on display.

Madame Tussauds is another one of London’s must-see attractions. This famous wax museum features hundreds of life size replicas of celebrities, historical figures, royals and sports stars – including many of the athletes from the London Games, like Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt and British gold medallist Jessica Ennis.

If you’re looking to explore the more cultured side of London, head over to Britain’s national museum of modern and contemporary art, the Tate Modern. Towering over the River Thames, this refurbished power station now contains works by some of the world’s most influential artists. Have a bite to eat at one of the gallery’s restaurants and admire the scenery.

If you’re looking for something to do in London after the Olympics, then we hope this list gave you a few ideas. But for more detailed information about these attractions, as well as hundreds of other places of interest in London, head over to Hummba and download our London City Guide. It’s available on iPhone and Android, and packed with quality travel content from Frommer’s Unlimited.

Let us know what you think of our London picks, or make a few suggestions of your own in the comments below. See you in Rio de Janeiro 2016!

Happy travels!

Tourism Radio City Guides, featuring Frommer’s

Hummba’s parent company, Tourism Radio® recently partnered with US-based travel guide publisher Frommer’s® Unlimited; check out the earlier blog post here. In a nutshell, the partnership sees Tourism Radio’s audio city guides significantly beefed up with quality Frommer’s travel content.

That means we’ve now got more than 40 guides, to destinations all over the world, with more on the way. Our current offerings include guides to New York, Paris, Berlin, Singapore and even the islands of Hawaii. You can find these through the Hummba guide store or search for your favourite destinations through the continent and country pages on the Hummba website.

Just click on North America, for example, and you’ll be provided with information about the continent, as well as a list of the guides we have on offer. There are several city guides in the United States of America, and Canada, that you can download directly onto your mobile phone.

Thanks to our partnership with Frommer’s, these guides now contain detailed information about the various tourist attractions, restaurants and accommodation facilities found in the area, and much more! What better way to explore the cities you visit on your travels? You can even use them to discover more about the cities you’ve lived in for years.

On top of all that, there are also a number of ‘lite’ guides, which can be downloaded absolutely free of charge. These lite guides give you the opportunity to sample the content of some of the more popular travel guides, before committing to paying for the full one. We recommend you give the Paris and London lite guides a try, and if you like them, purchase the full guides.

For more information about Tourism Radio’s City Guides, visit hummba.com. Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter as well (@tourismradio and @hummba). That way you’ll be the first to know when we release new city guides in the coming weeks.

New and improved version of the Hummba mobile travel application available for download

We recently released the latest version of our location-based Hummba mobile travel application (available on iPhone and Android). The app now comes jam-packed with new features, including the ability to find and purchase guides though the app itself, filter points of interest by category, as well as find your way with the innovative ‘go there’ button.

The new category filter allows Hummba users to search through thousands of museums, restaurants, historical attractions, and more, at touch of a button. The partnership between Hummba’s parent company, Tourism Radio®, and Frommer’s® Unlimited, a world-renowned travel guide publisher, has ensured that our guides now contain an unprecedented amount of up-to-date, quality travel information.

The Hummba application also supports in-app purchasing. This means you can search for the guides you want either on the Hummba website or in the app itself, where you can make your purchases directly. Just download a guide to your favourite holiday destination and pay for it through the Hummba app, even while you’re on the move. There’s no need to find a computer and search through the app store for your guides.

On top of these features, Hummba also puts you in the right direction. Need to find the quickest way to get from your hotel in London to Big Ben? Just select the Big Ben point of interest in Hummba and hit the ‘go there’ button in the top right corner. Hummba will use your current location to map out a route. There’s no need for bulky guide books and impossible-to-use city maps, just use Hummba.

For more information about Hummba, the Hummba app, or our comprehensive city guides to popular tourist destinations all over the world, visit hummba.com.

Hummba launches new travel guide store, featuring dozens of free and paid audio travel guides

More frequent visitors to hummba.com will by now have realised that our website recently underwent a facelift. Along with some fancy new graphics and a few improvements to the site’s user-friendly design, we’ve also put together an all-new Hummba travel guide store.

Through the store, you’ll have easy access to our comprehensive city travel guides. These feature hours of audio content that plays when you approach specific places, seamlessly blended with up-to-date travel information provided by Frommer’s® Unlimited. Frommer’s has been a trusted source of travel information for more than 50 years, and they have partnered with Hummba’s parent company, Tourism Radio®, to produce what we believe will be the next generation of mobile travel guides.

The Hummba travel guide store features guides to popular tourist destinations across the globe, like New York City, Paris and London, as well as dozens of other cities. Each guide contains hundreds of points of interest, with detailed information about well-known tourist attractions, monuments, museums, restaurants, clubs and also accommodation facilities. You can see all of the points of interest online, before you buy the guide, which means you know exactly what you’re paying for when you download the guide onto your mobile phone.

The guides will be free to download until the 1st of May, after which they will range in price from US$0.99 to US$4.99, depending on the amount of travel content they contain. There is also a selection of free travel guides, known as lite guides, which you can download to your mobile at no charge. The only difference between the free guides and the paid guides is the amount of travel content available. That way you can test out our city guides without having to commit to making a payment first. If you like what you see, then buy the full city guide and experience the guide to the fullest.

For more information about Hummba and our exciting range of free and paid city guides, visit hummba.com, or head over to the travel guide store directly. Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook to get all the information you need about the Hummba travel guide store as it happens.

South African tech start-up Tourism Radio® partners with Frommer’s® Unlimited to provide local travel information in mobile audio guides

(Cape Town, South Africa / Hoboken, NJ, USA) South African travel technology company Tourism Radio has teamed up with Frommer’s® Unlimited in a move that is set to revolutionise the world of mobile travel guides.

Frommer’s has been a trusted travel resource for more than 50 years, and the partnership with the iconic travel brand will firmly establish Tourism Radio in the mobile space with the next generation of travel guides. Tourism Radio’s unique mobile technology seamlessly blends Frommer’s text content with Tourism Radio audio clips, which automatically play as travellers enter their location.

The initial partnership launch will entail the release of audio and text travel guides to a number of popular travel destinations around the world. This includes comprehensive guides to the top tourist cities of New York, London and Paris. The guides can be downloaded as standalone applications for Android and iPhone, or accessed through the Tourism Radio travel application, Hummba.

Hummba.com was included in the listings for the Top 20 Startups in Africa in Forbes magazine in February this year.

Tourism Radio founder and CEO Mark Allewell says, “We like to think of our partnership with Frommer’s as serendipity on steroids. Travellers will now be able to easily access an unprecedented amount of quality travel information, directly from their mobile phones. We’re also delighted to partner with one of the world’s oldest and most respected travel companies, and we look forward to producing guides that cater for every traveller’s needs.”

The Frommer’s Unlimited team is optimistic about the partnership’s potential in the travel landscape. "Offering Frommer's travel information through Tourism Radio's intelligent mobile audio guides is an exciting new way for travelers to access our expert travel advice at the right time in the right place,” said Craig Schickler, Director of E-Business Development, Wiley. “We are happy to be working with Tourism Radio and together helping shape memorable experiences for travelers around the globe."

From launch until the 1st of May, the audio travel guides from across the globe will be free for download, after which, they will range in price from US$ 0.99 to US$4.99, depending on the amount of travel content they contain. A selection of free, ‘lite’ guides, to several popular destinations around the world, will also be available for download. These give travellers the opportunity to sample the content before committing to the purchase of a full guide.

About Frommer’s® Unlimited

For over 50 years, Frommer's travel guides have been the trusted choice to help travelers explore destinations the way the locals do. Frommer’s Unlimited enables businesses to create high-value propositions for their customers by leveraging Frommer’s travel expertise, rich content resources and technical capabilities.

Products and services provided by Frommer’s Unlimited include global destination and events content, private label Websites, mobile applications and custom publishing. Whether your customers are venturing close to home or across the globe, whether your budget is limited or limitless, Frommer’s Unlimited delivers the most candid and reliable travel and event information, anywhere and anytime. Frommer’s is a registered trademark of Arthur Frommer. Frommer’s is a branded imprint of Wiley.

About Tourism Radio®

Founded in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2005, Tourism Radio is the brainchild of serial entrepreneur Mark Allewell. Tourism Radio provides location-based technology and travel content, and currently has offices in South Africa, New Zealand and Spain. Tourism Radio’s mobile phone application, Hummba, is a traveller’s community and travel guide shop where users can buy travel guides, create travel routes, upload picture postcards and share their travel experiences with fellow travellers.