From free city browsing to an AI-powered travel companion. Every tier is designed to reduce the cognitive load of travel planning — so you can put that mental energy into actually being in the place.
No countdown timers. No artificial urgency. If you want more, it’s here when you’re ready.
Start here. Browse all 50 cities and 10 activity categories with no account required.
The essentials for serious trip planning: clean reading environment, saved lists, offline access.
For travelers who plan thoroughly and want the tools to match their curiosity.
Full city guides plus the complete Grande Web Network — language, cuisine, puzzles, and more.
Every feature, plus an AI Travel Companion that builds custom itineraries and preps you linguistically.
Annual plans save ~17%. Cancel anytime. No lock-in periods.
| Feature | Explorer | Plus | Pro | All-Access | AI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| All 50 city guide pages | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| 10 activity categories | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Monthly newsletter | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Ad-free reading | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Saved city favorites | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Offline city PDFs | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Custom itinerary builder | — | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Neighborhood deep-dives | — | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Early access to new cities | — | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Full GWN network (40+ sites) | — | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| AI custom itinerary generation | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Language prep coaching | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Cultural briefings + local Q&A | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
The cognitive science case for ad-free reading in a travel-planning context is more concrete than it might appear. John Sweller's cognitive load theory — developed through decades of experimental work on how people learn from instructional materials — distinguishes between three types of load on working memory. Intrinsic load is the inherent complexity of what you're trying to understand (the geography of Kyoto's ward system, say, or the relationship between Montreal's Plateau neighborhood and its Francophone cultural identity). Germane load is the productive mental work of forming schemas — building the mental models that turn individual facts into useful knowledge. Extraneous load is everything else: distractions, poor formatting, visual noise, information that isn't relevant to your goal.
Advertising, when injected into information-dense content, functions as extraneous load. It is not neutral. Research on attention and working memory — drawing on the foundational dual-coding work of Alan Paivio and the attention capture research of Raymond, Shapiro, and Arnell on the attentional blink — shows that visual interruptions consume working memory capacity even when consciously ignored. The cognitive cost is real and additive. When you are trying to build a coherent mental model of an unfamiliar city while simultaneously filtering intrusive visual noise, you are asking your working memory to do two jobs simultaneously. Schema formation suffers.
The City Plus tier's primary value proposition is straightforward: if you are doing serious trip planning — building the kind of pre-trip cognitive map that makes arriving in a city feel like visiting a place you partly know rather than a space you're completely unfamiliar with — you deserve a reading environment that is working with your cognition, not against it.
Daniel Kahneman's research on System 1 and System 2 thinking adds another dimension. Travel planning at its best is a System 2 activity: deliberate, effortful, working through the implications of choices (Does this neighborhood actually suit how we travel? Is this itinerary physically realistic?). Advertising is calibrated to trigger System 1 responses — rapid, involuntary attention capture. The two are not compatible at full intensity. City Plus is for travelers who want to do the System 2 work properly.
The City All-Access tier unlocks the full Grande Web Network — a set of 40+ sites whose learning and discovery missions complement each other in ways that are particularly valuable for the kind of traveler who wants depth, not just itineraries.
Regional cuisine and wine pairing guides. Essential for trips to France, Italy, California wine country, or anywhere food culture is part of why you’re going.
Language tools and word-reference resources. Build vocabulary before visiting non-English destinations.
Multilingual vocabulary and linguistic exploration. Context-rich language learning for travelers visiting Japan, France, or Canada’s Francophone regions.
Geography puzzles, city-themed crosswords, and knowledge challenges. Cognitive flexibility practice that happens to build destination knowledge.
Artisan cheese guides with regional origin maps. Genuinely useful for European travel where local cheese culture is part of the place.
The network home and community. Connect with other travelers and network members across 40+ sites.
The network access value is clearest for travelers who approach a destination holistically. If you’re going to Kyoto, you’re not just planning logistics — you're building cultural intelligence: the food, the language, the history, the geographic logic of the city, the sensory texture of the experience. Individual sites give you fragments of that. The All-Access tier gives you the full mosaic.
The All-Access + AI tier’s Travel Companion is built for three specific use cases where AI assistance provides genuine, non-trivial value over static content — and only those three. We’re not padding the tier with features that sound impressive and deliver little.
Custom itinerary generation: You tell the AI your travel dates, your party composition, your interests (and what you explicitly don’t want), your pace preference, and any constraints. It generates a day-by-day itinerary that integrates A2Z Things To Do’s city knowledge with your specific parameters. The output is editable, shareable, and downloadable as a PDF. The AI does the combinatorial work — the scheduling optimization that is genuinely tedious to do manually across a 7-day trip with multiple cities.
Local-expert Q&A: Ask specific questions that general city pages don’t answer: “Is this neighborhood actually walkable at night?” “What’s the best way to get from Osaka to Nara without losing half a day?” “Which of these three neighborhoods best suits someone who wants quiet mornings and evening culture?” The AI draws on the depth of our city content and supplements it with up-to-date local knowledge.
Language preparation coaching: For trips to Japan, French Canada, or other non-English destinations, the AI builds you a personalized vocabulary and phrase set based on your specific itinerary — not generic tourist phrases, but language calibrated to the neighborhoods and venues you’ll actually visit. This is precisely the kind of deliberate practice that Ericsson’s research identifies as more effective than passive exposure: targeted, contextual, feedback-rich language preparation.
Can I change or cancel my plan at any time?
Yes. You can upgrade, downgrade, or cancel from your account settings page at any time. If you cancel a monthly plan, you retain access through the end of the billing period. Annual plans are non-refundable after 30 days, but you can cancel auto-renewal so it doesn’t renew at the next anniversary. There are no lock-in periods and no cancellation fees.
Does City Plus or City Pro include all 50 cities, or just a selection?
Every paid tier includes full access to all 50 cities currently in the A2Z Things To Do guide library — the continental US, Canada, Hawaii, and Japan. The difference between tiers is not which cities you can access, but what tools and features you have for planning within them. City Pro users get neighborhood deep-dives and itinerary tools for every city in the library.
Is there a plan for educators or educational institutions?
A2Z Things To Do’s content is well-suited to place-based learning curricula, geography courses, cultural studies programs, and pre-travel preparation in study-abroad contexts. If you’re an educator looking for institutional access for a class or program, contact us at contact@a2zthingstodo.com to discuss options. Individual educator subscriptions can be started on any standard plan immediately.
How do the offline PDFs work in the City Plus tier?
Once you’ve saved a city to your favorites list, you can generate a clean, print-ready PDF of the full city guide from your account dashboard. The PDF includes all sections of the city page — neighborhoods, activity categories, seasonal timing, hidden gems — formatted for reading without a screen. It’s designed for travelers who want the content accessible when their phone’s connectivity is limited (flights, rural day trips, international data roaming).
Are international payment methods supported?
Yes. Payments are processed through Stripe, which supports credit and debit cards from most countries, as well as Apple Pay and Google Pay where available. All prices are listed in USD. Your card provider applies its standard currency conversion rate; we don’t add a foreign transaction fee on our end.
How often do new cities get added, and when do I get access?
We add cities based on research depth and content quality — we’d rather cover 50 cities thoroughly than 200 cities superficially. New cities are added several times per year. City Pro and above members get early access to newly published city guides, typically two to four weeks before they appear to free and Plus users. You can see upcoming cities on your account dashboard once you’re logged in.
The behavioral economics of subscription pricing involves a well-documented toolkit of techniques: anchor pricing, decoy effects, countdown timers, artificial scarcity, and the loss-aversion framing that makes “LAST CHANCE” banners so effective at converting people who didn’t really want what they’re buying. We’ve deliberately avoided all of it.
The five tiers above are priced to reflect genuine, incremental value differences. The Explorer tier is free and functional — it includes everything you need to browse all 50 cities. The Plus tier’s core benefit is a cleaner reading environment, which is worth something real to travelers doing serious research, and nothing at all to travelers who aren’t bothered by the free experience. The Pro tier’s itinerary builder and neighborhood depth serve travelers who plan actively. All-Access serves travelers who are part of a broader learning ecosystem. The AI tier serves travelers who want computational assistance with the combinatorial work of trip design.
None of these are the right choice for everyone, and we’re not trying to convince you otherwise. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s research on choice architecture argues that the way options are presented shapes decisions independent of preferences — that even well-intentioned design can nudge people toward choices that don’t serve them. We’ve tried to present these tiers in a way that serves your decision-making rather than gaming it: clear feature lists, honest prices, no artificial urgency, no pre-selected annual plans, no fine-print gotchas.
If the free tier is what you need, use it. The content will still be here when your needs change.