Contact Shaka Guide GPS Audio Tours Support

by Raywater

I have used other similar tour guides but the design and maps and mini commercials made me think Shaka looked like the best tour guide apps. So on a recent trip to 3 Hawaiian islands I bought the tour bundle. And if I were rating just the tour audio it would be 5 stars. The guide is entertaining and the background music that accompanies the spoken audio is excellent! Now for the negative… the app kept restarting and I would have to go find my tour again! I think part of the problem was I was running google maps simultaneously and when I stopped that the restarts were less frequent but would still happen often when I paused the trip. It also bugged me that the app is laid out so the store is the main landing page when it should be the trips. It should be easy to get to a trip and restart it once I have purchased one, not feel like I have to click past ads for the trip I have already purchased and then have to click through the trip intro buttons again and again! Ugh! My last critique is that at some point my phone got trapped in in browse mode and there was no way I could find to click the button to go back to trip mode so all I could do was click the audio points manually. Overall I found the tours great but the app itself was a disappointing experience!

by Isidore4000

I really like the idea of this kind of guide, but in the end I have mixed feelings about Shaka. We listened to all of the Volcano NP tour and part of the south coast tour. Here’s what I liked and what I didn’t.

The good: music selections and stories about the gods and legends were both highlights. Because the guide is keyed to gps, you do see things you might otherwise have missed. The turn by turn directions work great for some tricky intersections

The less good: for my taste, these guides are short on information. The Volcanoes guide was better in this regard than the south coast guide, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that these guides were pitched at too general an audience to really tell you very much. Vanishingly little history, not much Hawaiian cultural information beyond the mythology I mentioned above, and light on science and natural history. I get the sense that in an effort to make the guides accessible to all audiences, they’ve reduced the content to just the slimmest basics. Maybe if you’re traveling with small kids this is a bonus, but I found most of the entries too light on information to be very interesting. I bought the whole big island package, but after listening to one and a half tours I think I’ve had my fill. I like the (printed) Hawaii: The Big Island Revealed *much* better. But of course you can’t read that while you’re driving!

by Kevps

We purchased the Road to Hana app. It worked fine for the first portion of our trip that day and followed the route as described. But each time we stopped, the GPS signal had to be reconnected and after about 1/3 of the way there was no connection. We then had to try to follow the app manually and it was extremely frustrating. We missed stops and sights because of the problem and never saw some of the described landmarks. Do not attempt to use this app if you are driving solo, it will require a passenger to manage the app. We are better than average tech users and it just didn’t work as described. (And yes we had downloaded the app ahead of time as instructed) There was no way to contact support as there was no cell reception on most of the road. Better directions could have been provided about food options in Paia at the beginning of the trip. In our opinion, the choice of going left at the fork in Hana was the wrong choice. We had to find our way on our own that going to the right takes you to the business district where you’ll find the farmers market and some good food truck options for food. Driving the road to Hana is difficult enough itself without the frustration we experienced with this app.