Right up your street

For some people, planning a touring holiday is all part of the fun. Route planning software is increasingly trying to take advantage of this fact, providing automated journey plans, lists of tourist attractions and other features to assist you. Here's a look at two of the leading products.

AutoRoute 2002

AutoRoute 2002 is the latest incarnation of Microsoft's route planning software. The emphasis is on ease of use, which shows right from the start.

As soon as you launch the program, you can type in a place name and have it located on a map. If more than one place shares the same address, a Find dialog box asks you to be more precise.

If you've entered a street name, postcode or town the map appears on a different scale, each one being appropriate for the level of detail you've requested.

To plan a route, you first click a toolbar icon then enter start and end points and any stop-off locations. Icons make this process fast and easy, and you can manually move places up and down in the visiting order or automatically optimise the set of places to be visited.

The engine is fast and routes are delivered both as maps and written instructions. Map printing is possible using five different styles, including turn-by-turn maps, which print key junctions, and strip maps, which put a map section alongside text directions.

Other features include the ability to add your own locations to a map via Pushpins. These can be used as way points in a journey, allowing you to specify driving speeds on different kinds of road or provide help with journey times.

You can also draw directly onto maps in order to annotate them for printing. If you're able to take the software on a journey, then its built-in GPS support might be useful.

You can locate cities and towns all over the world, but AutoRoute 2002's route planning engine only covers western Europe. Street-level mapping is only available in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the UK. There's also a tendency for the map to be more detailed in urban areas.

AutoRoute 2002 wants to be a lot more than just a route planning tool and its key extras are designed to provide additional assistance to tourists.

The Places database is probably the most significant of these. The software can find a range of places, either within a specified radius of a selected spot or along an entire route.

You can specify how many kilometres, or miles, off the journey line or around a place to look, and which types of place you want to be notified about. The range spans airports, ferry terminals, railway stations, motorway services, pubs, hotels, tourist attractions and more.

An additional aid to tourists comes in the form of a euro converter, phrasebooks and more than 1,500 articles on places of interest. If you're planning a trip abroad, however, printed guidebooks and the web are far superior resources.

If you have a handheld PC running Windows CE 2.0 or later, the included Pocket Streets application enables you to download maps for mobile use.

AutoRoute 2002 is a powerful application with plenty going for it and the overall user interface design makes it feel very much a home user product.

Price: (as reviewed inc. VAT) £59.99

Contact: Microsoft 0870 601 0100
www.microsoft.com/autoroute/

Route Europe Professional 2001-2002

Route 66's latest product comes in three versions, with the Professional version we've reviewed here being the most comprehensive and expensive.

A UK-only product, Route Britain 2001-2002 costs £29.99 (inc. VAT), while Route Europe 2001-2002 is £29.99 (inc. VAT). Route Europe Professional 2001-2002 is, at £59.99 (inc. VAT), in line with AutoRoute 2002.

Like AutoRoute 2002, Route Europe Professional has Europe-wide coverage. You can't locate cities that fall outside its routing scope as you can in AutoRoute 2002, though, and the opening screen clearly delineates what is and isn't within its boundaries.

Street-level mapping is a key feature of Route Europe Professional, with 13 countries covered in full or in part. Just as with AutoRoute 2002, the developers rely on third-party information providers for this data, so there are gaps in coverage.

A diagram on the box makes it clear where coverage extends to street level. Street name and postcode searching are both possible and you can also look specifically for points of interest.

Planning a route is easy. Simply type a street, town or place of interest in the Find box and it's listed. The map doesn't automatically refresh each time it finds somewhere in its database, which means that searching is very fast.

A button lets you add a place to a route list. If there are more than two places on this list, then their order can be changed. Clicking on a further button will recalculate the route and the map will refresh to display it.

Print options are nowhere near as comprehensive as those in AutoRoute 2002, with simple map or textual itinerary choices being the only options available.

The good news as far as map printing is concerned is that you can see a preview and make selections of the appropriate sections on a suitable scale. Nevertheless, AutoRoute 2002 wins as far as flexibility is concerned.

Just as with AutoRoute 2002, you can add your own places to the software's database as Pushpins and use these as points on a route. Route Europe Professional is also GPS-compatible.

You can edit various preferences, including travelling speeds, on a wide range of road types. You can also set up what the software calls Road Blocks, which are areas you want to avoid.

Taking this concept one step further, you can get up-to-date road traffic information via the internet. Descriptive data downloads into a separate window and the location of each problem area is marked on a map.

Data is saved for offline use. If you have an always-on web connection, this feature can be configured to refresh at regular intervals. Dial-up users can simply refresh when they need to.

A database of points of interest could help you to plan a trip. These span a wide range, including cinemas, hotels and railway stations. Unfortunately, the software isn't clever enough to search near a place or route for these on your behalf.

Route Europe Professional 2001-2002 is less intuitive to use than AutoRoute 2002, but its engine is faster and it's a far less cluttered application.

Price: as reviewed (inc. VAT) £59.99

Distributor: PC World 08000 565 732

Contact: www.route66.nl

Decisions, decisions

Choosing between AutoRoute 2002 and Route Europe Professional 2001-2002 isn't an easy matter. Pricing is so close as not to be a factor, while both titles allow you to plan routes with minimal fuss.

Both databases are large and easy to access, although they can never be complete. AutoRoute 2002's ability to search its Places database relative to a geographical location or a planned route is a real plus while, if you need total accuracy, then Route Europe Professional 2001-2002's ability to get the latest road traffic information from the internet will appeal.

Don't be drawn in by AutoRoute's foreign phrase books, because a printed book you can carry around on holiday will be of far more use.

Route planning online

There are many online services that provide route planning and location finding tools. For example, Streetmap (www.streetmap.co.uk) is a dedicated location finder.

Give the site the name of a UK street, postcode, place, grid reference or telephone area code, and it will provide a location map. You can print maps and use the URLs in a website or email them to somebody.

Multimap (www.multimap.com) provides a similar service, and for London includes an Underground map and index of useful places and tourist sites. There's also a route planner and a direction finding service.

Other route planning services are provided by the likes of the AA (www.theaa.com/travelwatch), the RAC (www.rac.co.uk), Michelin (www.viamichelin.com) and Green Flag (www.greenflag.co.uk).

Even the Shell Group (www.shellgeostar.com) is in on the act, with its route planner being augmented by Europe-wide city maps along with tourist information.

All of these sites offer a straightforward journey planner and produce both written directions and maps. Many have coverage above and beyond the UK and some also offer equivalent WAP services.

You'll often find more than just route planning at these sites. Typical extras include up-to-the-minute traffic information, local weather data and links to various travel services, such as ferry, hotel and other booking facilities.

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