Part of every stereotypical tourist vacation is planning out itineraries, which generally can require a lot of time and research, and possibly cash spent on guidebooks to exotic locales. SpotWorld aims to take all -- or at least most -- of the hassle of planning expeditions by compiling all the information you need into a combo GPS, hotspot guide, encyclopedia, and light community networking app.

SpotWorld does a good job of giving you most, if not all the information you might want to have for a vacation in, say, Paris or New York, at least if you’re okay with mostly staying within the dots of "status quo" travel planning.

SpotWorld focuses on the popular spots instead of taking you off the beaten path.

Browsing destinations will let you see what’s popular everywhere in several major U.S. cities and a few international locations. If you’ve already arrived you can click Spots Near Me to see what’s of interest in your general vicinity. And you can also check popular itineraries to check what users have uploaded as their favorite places, or just read up on local history thanks to SpotWorld- and Wikipedia-supplied write-ups.

As helpful as this might sound, SpotWorld is pretty limited in its scope. Popular spots to check out are only the most popular (Empire State Building, Champs Elysées, the Space Needle, etc.) -- which are also the most crowded and the ones you're most likely to already know about. If you try to search “best pizza and beer in Milwaukee,” SpotWorld can’t really help you.

Once you find a place you want to visit, you can add it your itinerary.

There’s also the small problem of location: the app currently only supports a list of a 30 cities or so, leaving anywhere that’s even slightly off the beaten path outside the limit of SpotWorld’s reach.

The bottom line. If this problem is addressed in future updates, SpotWorld could become a somewhat valuable app for basic tourist needs. For now it’s little more than a location-based curiosity. Meh.