Czech coffee geeks launch a Tripadvisor for European cafés

Apps and websites for finding restaurants and hotels are easy to come by, but until now there hasn’t been anything on a similar scale to help travelers find great quality coffee.

A new Czech portal is about to change this. European Coffee Trip, developed by coffee-lovers from Moravia, collates information about cafés to visit not only in the Czech Republic but all over Europe. Developers Aleš Pospíšil and Radek Nožička say their mobile app is poised to become to coffee lovers what Tripadvisor is to international travelers.

“We offer tips on more than two thousand cafés from more than 39 European countries. So whether you’re in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy or Iceland, you’ll find inspiration for where to go for a good coffee,” said Pospíšil to CzechCrunch.

The Czech Republic and the United Kingdom represent the countries with the most entries on the portal while London is the city with the highest number of cafés logged with Prague a close second (additional Czech cities with guides include Brno, Pilsen, Olomouc). But European Coffee Trip has information about cafés throughout the continent, from the Canary Islands to Iceland.

The app has been nine years in the making, coming into being after the creators noticed that there was no significant international portal devoted solely to the appreciation of coffee. They realized that coffee lovers in Europe had no single database of great cafés to help them in their travels.

“In 2014, the coffee scene was very small and there was no way to find good cafés in Europe. There was no English-language media to report on this. The media that existed focused mostly on America,” said Pospíšil.

Cafés were then selected based on the creators’ own experiences “in the field,” traveling from city to city across Europe to try out cafés and meet other coffee enthusiasts. After a year, they had collated around 200 cafés into the database.

Now, over 2,000 are included. The website is distinguished by its strict qualification standards; only cafés which the creators feel are truly worthy make the cut.

As well as the quality of their coffee, cafés are evaluated based on the helpfulness and knowledgeability of their staff, their coffee-making equipment and their cleanliness. As the app becomes more popular, the creators hope to bring more locally-based “ambassadors” into the process of selecting cafés.

The website also posts coffee-themed videos focusing on coffee preparation, giving people at home the chance to learn more about the complicated art of professional coffee-making. Some of the portal's videos have millions of views on YouTube. The new mobile app is an all-Czech affair, backed by Czech development studio Cookielab. An iOS version has been created and an Android version is slated for release this year.

It’s hoped that notwithstanding the ongoing Covid pandemic, a revival of “café tourism“ could be in store throughout Europe. European Coffee Trip hope to be at the forefront of this return to café culture.