Honest GPSmyCity Review: An App for DIY Walking Tours

If you love exploring new destinations at your own pace without being tied to rigid tour groups, finding the right trip planning tool is essential. In this GPSmyCity review, we break down how this mobile app works, its exact features, and whether it can truly help you build a seamless DIY walking tour.

We tested the GPSmyCity app firsthand during a trip to Lisbon to plan out our daily sightseeing, as well as in Key West, Florida, a city we have visited multiple times, where we wanted to uncover brand-new spots. For example, using the app in Key West led us to discover several bars we had previously missed, including the Bull and Whistle Bar, which is famous for the “Garden of Eden“, an adult, clothing-optional rooftop deck.

Read on to discover how the app’s offline maps, custom routing, and audio guides perform in real-world travel conditions.

Full Disclosure: This is a collaboration review in which we received a three-year free pass. This free pass gave us full access to both available features: “City Walks” and “Insider Tips”. We were not required to submit our article for approval before publishing, so you get our honest perspective based on our experience using the app.

A Quick Heads-Up: This review reflects our exact experience with the GPSmyCity app as of June 2026. Because tech moves fast and app developers are always tweaking things, some layouts or features might change or improve by the time you’re reading this and downloading it for your own trip.

Exploring the App: City Walks vs. Insider Tips

The GPSmyCity app has two main options: “City Walks” and “Insider Tips.” Depending on the subscription you choose, you will grant yourself access to both or just one of them.

The City Walks Features

The City Walks feature is centered around active navigation and structured itineraries. It allows you to either use pre-made routes or build a completely personalized route.

• Premade and Custom Itineraries: The app offers ready-to-use walking routes, but you can also completely customize them to fit your needs by rearranging the order of stops, deleting landmarks, or adding your own. For our multi-day trip to Lisbon, the app had several sightseeing walks available at the time of our visit. We used these pre-made sightseeing walks to tailor entirely separate itineraries for different days—allocating one day for the Belem district, one day for the Alfama district, and another for our day trip to Sintra.
• Automatic Duration Updates: A huge benefit of the customization feature is that when you add or delete a stop, the app automatically updates the total duration of the walking tour, making it highly practical for planning your day.
• Audio Guide Feature: The app’s pre-made sightseeing walk comes with an introductory narrative audio as well as detailed history audio for each individual landmark. However, we noticed that this introductory audio narrative is not included when you choose to customize your own sightseeing walk. Instead, you will only be able to use the audio feature for the individual landmarks (as long as they are already in the app’s database). For the pre-made sightseeing walks, you can seamlessly combine the introductory audio and individual landmark audio to use as a complete self-guided audio tour.
• Required Downloads: To access and use these city walks during your trip, you must download them to your mobile device first.

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The City Walks Features to Keep in Mind

• Database Constraints: You can add your hotel, a specific restaurant, or a custom sightseeing spot, but the search tool only works if the location is already inside the app’s custom database. It does not have all the locations you would typically find on Google Maps.
• Map Pin Only: If a location isn’t in their database, you have to manually drop a pin on the map and name it. While this shows up as a blue custom pin on your map view, when you manually drop a pin to add a customized spot, it does not give you the option to add a stop duration for that specific place. Because you cannot input how much time you plan to spend at that custom pin, the app cannot add that stop’s time into your total itinerary duration calculation.

The City Walks Audio Features

• Earphones Required: To get the best experience out of the audio tour at each stop, we recommend you use earphones.
• Manual Page Flipping: When the audio starts, it does not highlight the text or scroll automatically as it plays. You have to follow the text manually if you want to read and listen at the same time.
• Fixed Speed: You cannot adjust or speed up the audio playback.
• Audio Quality Variation: We noticed that a few of the pre-made sightseeing walks used a robotic AI voice, while most use a real human narrator voice. The ones with the human voice are definitely more engaging than the AI robotic voice.

The Insider Tips Features

The Insider Tips feature functions primarily as an in-depth research tool for your travel planning phase. Instead of just standard routes, it consists of several curated travel articles.

• Beyond Typical Sightseeing: These articles are written by travel bloggers and local writers. They cover deep-dive topics that change by city, such as local food tours, hidden gems, nightlife, couple activities, seasonal travel advice, etc.
• Article Quality and Style: The articles are well-written and read very much like a travel blog post, focusing on sharing personalized experiences and practical tips for the destination.
• Turning Articles into Itineraries: You can use the specific spots mentioned within an Insider Tips article to create your own self-guided tour with recommended order or a customized order.
• Access Options: You can read these articles online or download them directly to your phone for offline access so you don’t have to worry about data roaming charges.
• No Audio Component: The key difference between this feature and City Walks is that Insider Tips articles do not include an audio guide option.

The Insider Tips Features To Keep in Mind

• Location Constraints: While you can create a custom walk out of the spots listed in an article, you cannot add outside custom locations (like dropping a blue pin) in the Insider Tips view, the way you can in City Walks.
• The “Go There” Button: Inside each article, recommended places have a “Go There” button to generate a route. However, you have to open the article during your actual vacation to use it because the feature requires you to be physically located within the map area covered by the app to calculate the route.
• Download Required: If you use an Insider Tips article to customize a walk, the app will require you to download that specific walk to your device.

How the GPSmyCity App Works for Offline Travel

One of the biggest advantages of the app is its ability to function entirely offline. Once you organize your itinerary using Wi-Fi or mobile data, you can download the assets directly to your phone to use without an internet connection. This is incredibly helpful if you want to avoid international roaming fees completely, or if you visit areas with spotty coverage where a weak cellular signal can quickly drain your mobile battery.

For example, during our day trip from Lisbon to Sintra, the Pena Palace is located in a remote, mountainous area where data connectivity can sometimes drop. In situations like this, you can simply turn off your cellular data to save battery and use the downloaded app in offline mode without issue.

Pro-Tip: Even when your data is turned off, running an offline map that constantly pings your GPS location might drain your phone battery quickly. We highly recommend packing a portable power bank if you plan to use the app for a full day of walking.

Offline Requirements & Storage

• Device Settings: To use the app properly without data, you may need to calibrate your location manually and ensure your device privacy settings allow location tracking.
• Device Memory Management: Because downloaded walking tours utilize your phone’s internal storage, memory usage is a factor. However, the app gives you the option to easily delete a walking tour once you are finished with it to free up space.
• Live Updates: We noticed that if a downloaded itinerary receives a structural change or information update, the app notifies you to update to the latest version, ensuring your offline data stays accurate.

On-the-Go Navigation: What to Expect

Once your itinerary is ready and you are physically in the city to start your walking tour, you have two primary navigation choices:

1. In-App Navigator: You can use the app’s built-in navigator to guide you from stop to stop. However, this navigator option only activates when you are physically located within the active map area of the GPSmyCity app (you cannot test or preview the live navigation from home).
2. Google Maps Integration: Alternatively, if you prefer to get directions using Google Maps instead of the in-app navigator, the app allows you to do so (and that’s what we mostly used since we are savvy users of Google Maps to navigate during our trips). Please note that this will not automatically map out or delineate your entire pre-planned route within Google Maps. The complete, structured route remains visible only inside the GPSmyCity app’s native navigator.

General App Usability

• User Friendliness: The app itself is very friendly, and they provide several online tutorials to help you understand how to navigate the settings.
• Text View Limitations: The reading view could be improved. You can only adjust the text size once (it offers only two total text sizes). There is currently no custom reading mode for those who prefer to read with a black background.

GPSmyCity App Cost and Subscription Options

To use the GPSmyCity app beyond your initial test, you must select a subscription plan. They offer a three-day free trial, followed by annual subscription rates:

• City Walks: Starting at $14.99 per year for access to over 670 self-guided walking tours.
• Insider Tips: Starting at $14.99 per year for access to travel articles covering over 1,300 cities.
• City Walks + Insider Tips Combo: Starting at $20.99 per year for complete access to both features across 1,800 cities worldwide.

Note on Website Usage: You can use the official GPSMyCity website to conduct basic preliminary trip research for free, but you will not have access to full Insider Tips articles, pre-made city walks, or the ability to build custom walks.

Which Option is Best for Your Travel Needs?

Your choice between features comes down to your personal travel style:

• Choose City Walks if you want active, on-the-ground assistance. This was the feature we utilized the most because the audio guide was incredibly useful, and the feature that automatically calculates your total itinerary duration is highly helpful to plan out your day. For instance, when we visited the Jerónimos Monastery in Lisbon, the standard entry ticket did not include an audio guide. We relied on the City Walks feature in the app to learn about and appreciate the incredible architecture at our own pace without feeling rushed.
• Choose Insider Tips if you prefer a centralized directory to kickstart your research phase. It consolidates independent travel articles into one place, so you don’t have to scour the internet, making it a great option if you have no need for a self-guided audio feature during your actual trip.

GPSmyCity Pros & Cons

Pros:

• Functions entirely offline, saving you from roaming fees.
• Automatically updates your total itinerary duration when customizing walking routes.
• Serves as a fantastic, centralized starting point to research independent trips.

Cons:

• Text view has limited size adjustments and lacks a dark mode for easier reading.
• Custom dropped map pins cannot be calculated into your total itinerary stop time.
• Audio playback speed cannot be adjusted.

Final Conclusion: Our Honest GPSmyCity Review

In summary, this app serves as a practical tool for first-time trip planners who want to build an independent trip but aren’t sure where to begin. It consolidates destination information into one place, saving you from having to bounce between multiple websites to outline your initial ideas.

As travel researchers, we personally love studying destinations in deep detail before a trip by reading travel books and articles from our favorite bloggers to find unique, non-touristy experiences. An app like this works as a companion to that type of deep-dive research because it bridges the gap between raw inspiration and a structured, actionable daily plan. It provides a useful, streamlined starting point to organize your daily goals, which is why we easily combine it with our typical planning procedure to get the absolute best of both worlds.