Thanks for making this excellent product – highly recommended!
I have been using the Tourstart program for a few years now and I’d like to share this review.
My background as a motorcycle rider is the following:
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I have been riding motorcycles for more than 34 years
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I have had more than 30 motorcycles
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I ride an average of 15.000 km each year
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I have been travelling on my motorcycle all across Europe
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I am the editor of the www.motorcyclelife.eu blog
I guess I have been using motorcycle GPS devices for around 10 years, but I was not the first guy to accept the benefits of having a GPS system on my motorcycle.
It’s fair to say that I was a bit conservative, by sticking to paper maps even after the first usable GPS systems was available, and my basic thought was that maps have always been sufficient and I don’t want a computer to tell me where to go etc….
But with family, job and other obligations limiting my time to ride, it slowly dawned to me that I could make more of my precious motorcycle riding time with a GPS. Partly because I would not spend time going the wrong way, partly because I could plan the best routes from home and minimize the time on boring roads.
In the past 10 years I have had 4 different GPS systems (Tomtom and Garmin), and in the beginning I always used the route planner provided by the GPS supplier.
Unfortunately the route planner software provided by Tomtom and Garmin was really poor and I had so many problems:
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The software would not work on certain computers, or required frequent and time consuming updates
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User interface was really poor, and every time I was using the software I had to re-learn how to use it. Clearly it was software designed by engineers and with little or no time spend on user tests.
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Not all my friends was using the same GPS and sharing routes between different GPS brands or models was close to impossible.
Bottom line was that I hated making routes on my computer and I definitely missed some of the great roads around Europe because of the poor software.
I was really skeptic when someone introduced me to Tourstart, because why would I waste my time struggling with yet another routing software…
But as more of my riding friends were using Tourstart, I decided to give it a go, and it was a whole different world.
There is no installation required, so you just log in from any computer and you have instant access to all your routes. The user interface may not be perfect, but it is fairly intuitive and after using it for a few hours, I got the logic behind it and it’s not bad at all.
There is a lot of functions I don’t use (yet), but the best of it all is that I can now easily plan the route I want to go, whether it’s a one day trip, a weekend tour, or a two weeks ride to the far end of Europe.
Transferring the routes to my GPS or sharing them with friends is really easy too.
Jens Lyck www.motorcyclelife.eu