Tourist Eye debuts offline mobile travel guides on Android, iPhone

Tourist Eye pulls out of their closed beta this morning, as they simultaneously launch their app for the iPhone and Android. Two young Spanish founders, Javier Fernández Escribano and Ariel Cámus, are aiming for an international smartphone userbase. The company offers a collaborative space for creating and sharing travel plans and compiling travel guides and will compete with other startups such as Tripwolf.

Users are able to create their travel guides online, plan trips together with others and then access their guides on their smartphones on the go. One advantage, something most regular travelers are likely to appreciate, is that with their app users can browse through their stitched-together guides offline, forgoing hefty roaming fees.  If you’re not roaming, rather than uploading your tracks after your trip is over, you report as you move along, including checkins, image uploads, etc. Tourist Eye allows you to share your moves on the go, through a connection with Facebook. However, if you don’t have a data connection or if you’re roaming, the application will tag your activity with dates & times and your geo-location, so that once you do upload, your web travel journal will in effect be an exact blueprint of your trip’s activity.

With an emphasis on sharing and community, not only does the user share as he travels, but as the community grows, users will receive real-time mobile notifications from their Tourist Eye connections with comments and travel suggestions on the go.

Competition is abundant and varies in types of services offered. Take giants like Tripadvisor or other online travel communities like Tripwolf or Minube; these are more web focused. TripIt and the likes are more mobile oriented, but tend to focus more on your official travel bookings and itineraries. The closest bet would be mTrip, which has a specific focus on travel guides, trip planning and sharing on the mobile platform.

The team is working to deliver an Blackberry and Windows Mobile 7 versions shortly.