Gate Guru

Written By dan | 1 comment 

How many miles do you fly a year?
I really don’t know exactly how much I fly. I have never added it all up, but I do fly very, very often.

What is your home airport?
My home airport is Chicago O’Hare or Midway, it depends on who I’m flying out on. My favorite airport is Schiphol airport in the Netherlands. So much to see and buy. Its a big open space as well and very modern feel.

What is your favorite airport amenity?
My favorite restaurant is in The Tuscany Cafe, located at Concourse B in O’Hare Airport. The reason I like it so much is that the staff is very friendly and the food is great.

How do you use GateGuru?
I love GateGuru. I’m always launching it in different airports to see what food is available and the reviews from fellow travelers. It makes the travel experience much more relaxing.

What is your favorite feature of GateGuru?
I love that you added the maps of airports.

What would like to say to JetBlue?
Thank you so much for the airplane tickets. Flying is expensive and this will give me and my boyfriend a great opportunity to take a nice vacation that we both desperately need. We are already thinking about a cruise out of San Juan or a all-inclusive somewhere in the Caribbean. I haven’t ever done either, nor have I ever flown JetBlue, so I am looking forward to experiencing your airline.

Posted in Uncategorized

Written By dan | 1 comment 

If you haven’t yet downloaded the update to GateGuru, you are going to want to get it ASAP! GateGuru 1.5 has several new and exciting unique features that will be invaluable to any traveler in the 100 airports that we cover.

1) Maps – our #1 requested feature is here! Let the GateGuru maps show you where your gate is, where security is, or where baggage claim is located. Never again guess your way around the airport.

I know what you are thinking “Oh, maps, that is a neat feature, but seriously what else is there?” Well, we have 2 other amazing features that will completely change your airport experience!

2) High Flyers Contest sponsored by JetBlue – since we launched, the community aspects of GateGuru have been the features that our user base cares about the most. This includes the leaderboard, and we are thrilled to announce an exciting contest for GateGuru users to win free JetBlue tickets and vouchers! The winners of the High Flyers leaderboard in the month of June will get 2 free tickets on JetBlue (National Winner) or free $100 travel certificates (Regional Winners). Stuck on a summer delay? Write a few reviews, snap some photos, all in the name of getting to that #1 spot on the GateGuru leaderboard. Seriously, it’s that easy.
3) Get Discounts and Deals on Airport Retailers – You know those stores that you pass in the airport but don’t go in that much because there is no incentive? Well now there is! We are partnering with top airport retail brands to give exclusive deals and offers to GateGuru users. Get free stuff, get huge discounts, all just for shopping!

Go download GateGuru 1.5 and start enjoying the airport!

Posted in Features and Functionality, Uncategorized

Written By dan | No comments 

This afternoon, KAYAK’s iPhone apps (both the free and paid) were updated. The reason we mention this here, on the GateGuru blog, is because we are excited to now be a part of the KAYAK app. With this update, a new feature has been added to the KAYAK app, under a tab called Airports, which is basically the GateGuru database of airport amenities. The GateGuru and KAYAK content is very complimentary so we are excited to see users of the KAYAK app have this new feature.

So the next time you are searching for a flight, using their trip planning tools, or wandering aimlessly around the airport make sure you check out the Airports tab in the KAYAK app. Through the GateGuru logo on the bottom, you can launch GateGuru directly (to get reviews, see photos, or view the High Flyers for that airport) or go to our page in the App Store. You can see the full press release here

Safe Travels!

Posted in Uncategorized

Written By dan | 4 comments 

We are excited to announce the international expansion of GateGuru! The next time you open the app, you will see that new airports have been added to our database. As soon as we launched GateGuru covering the top 85 airports in the United States, there was strong demand for us to expand internationally. This expansion includes 14 new airports from Canada, London and the US (our first user contributed airport!) and brings our total airport count up to almost 100! See our press release covering the international expansion of GateGuru here.

In this initial international expansion, we have added the following airports:
1. London Heathrow Airport
2. Toronto Pearson International Airport
3. Vancouver International Airport
4. Montréal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport
5. Calgary International Airport
6. Edmonton International Airport
7. Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport
8. Halifax Stanfield International Airport
9. Winnipeg James Armstrong Richardson International Airport
10. Victoria International Airport
11. Kelowna International Airport
12. Saskatoon John G. Diefenbaker International Airport
13. Regina International Airport
14. Sarasota International Airport

Many users have reached out about us adding additional airports in the US. We are happy to report that Sarasota Airport has been added to the GateuGuru database through the contribution of Bill King. Other users are in the process of aggregating data for their “home” airports. If you are interested in adding your home airport or any other one not currently covered by our database, please email support@gateguruapp.com.

As always, thanks for the continued support. We wouldn’t be where we are today without our passionate user base who is always pushing us to make the product better. We have several more exciting announcements over the coming weeks, so stay tuned!

Safe travels.

Posted in Expansion, Features and Functionality

Written By dan | 1 comment 

Posted in Uncategorized

Written By dan | 5 comments 

GateGuru 1.2 was approved by Apple and is now available to be downloaded. In this update, we made several enhancements to GateGuru:
1. Better support for working offline or without connectivity to GateGuru’s servers
2. Ability to upload existing photos (from the Camera Roll) for GateGuru amenities
3. Fix for a recent change to Twitter OAuth

We aren’t resting on our laurels and are back at work for the next upgrade of GateGuru. We have a very exciting upcoming few weeks at GateGuru and we will keep you posted as new features, functions and partnerships are announced. In the mean time, thanks for your continued support. As always, if you have any comments or suggestions for GateGuru, please let us know at support [at] gateguruapp.com.

Safe travels.
Dan

Posted in Apple, Approval Process, Bug Fixes

Written By dan | No comments 

Obviously everyone is well aware of the disaster that has struck Haiti. At GateGuru, we have donated personally to the relief efforts, but we decided that we could do more. So we have decided to donate all proceeds from app sales today (January 20th) to Haitian Relief via the American Red Cross. Just to make it completely clear, we (GateGuru) will not receive any money from app sales today; any revenue that we generate will be sent directly to Haiti through the American Red Cross. As everyone knows, this is a worthy cause.

We hope that you will join us in the support effort.

Thanks.

Posted in Uncategorized

Written By jeff | No comments 

Vote for
GateGuru
in
Best Road Warrior App

The GateGuru team is pleased to announce yet another award nomination for the GateGuru iPhone app! We were recently notified that GateGuru is a finalist in the 2009 Best App Ever Awards in the category of Best Road Warrior App! We continue to be humbled by the outpouring of support for GateGuru from our users and the technology community, in general. Obviously, we’re big believers in simplifying the in-airport experience for travelers of all types and this type of recognition only strengthens our belief in the value of this service to the travel community worldwide. So, a big thank you from the entire GateGuru team to all our users and advocates! We could not have come this far without your support!


Now, please click on over to the Best App Ever Awards site and vote for GateGuru as the Best Road Warrior app!

Posted in App Reviews/Rewards

Written By jeff | 1 comment 

The GateGuru production servers are experiencing downtime currently as a result of an Amazon EC2-related failure at our hosting provider, Heroku. This server outage is causing an expected crash on all GateGuru iPhone clients as they attempt to login to the server to retrieve the latest ratings, reviews, and airport updates.

We are working with our service provider to quickly restore service. And we are simultaneously investigating the issues with our iPhone apps which are causing a crash instead of a graceful failure due to the lack of server resources.

We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience to our users and will be working furiously to get you back online with GateGuru ASAP.


Update (01/02/2010 11:07AM PST): The GateGuru servers are coming back online at Heroku. We have intermittent reports of cessation of app crashes as well as reports of successful use of the app which seem to indicate we’re coming back online gracefully. We will continue to monitor the situation and ask that you report any issues you experience to: support@gateguruapp.com. The GateGuru team thanks you for your patience and continued support.

Posted in Bug Fixes, Support

Written By jeff | No comments 

Over the course of the weekend, the GateGuru team has been busy testing a new version of our iPhone app which includes some performance fixes and minor UI tweaks. In the course of this testing, we came across a bug that causes an immediate crash when a user opens the app after the initial use. Although this issue had not presented itself prior to this testing, it now appears that this crash has been causing problems for some of our users. We estimate that only a small percentage of GateGuru users will experience this bug. If you are not experiencing this bug, you do not have to do anything with your version of GateGuru.

For those of you that have experienced this crashing issue, we have available a work around that will resolve this particular crash. We have removed the bug so that any new download of GateGuru from the app store (whether a new purchase or a resinstall) will not have it.

The work around steps are as follows:

Uninstall/Reinstall GateGuru from your iPhone

* Tap and hold the GateGuru application icon on your iPhone
* When all the app icons begin to shake, tab the “X” associated with the GateGuru application icon and confirm deletion.
* Once the app has been deleted from your phone, launch the App Store app from your iPhone
* Search the AppStore for “GateGuru”
* In the search results, select whichever version of GateGuru you are reinstalling
* Reinstall GateGuru. NOTE: If you are performing this process for GateGuru Full, you WILL NOT BE CHARGED AGAIN for reinstalling GateGuru.
* Once download completes, launch GateGuru and login with your GateGuru account that you created when you first bought the app.
* Enjoy the TRAVELution!

Unfortunately, this work around involves an uninstall and reinstall of the application which isn’t the cleanest solution. We are putting the finishing touches on a new version of the application that permanently removes this bug, as well as a few others. This new version of the app will be submitted to Apple tomorrow so we’ll hopefully have it in your hands in just a matter of a few days.

Thanks for all your positive feedback and, as always, don’t hesitate to contact support@gateguruapp.com for any problems you may be having with the app.

Posted in Bug Fixes, Support