Because You Can’t Travel Without Your Phone
Choosing the best apps to use when traveling can be just as complicated as deciding where to go or how to best get there. That’s why we’ve pulled together this list of the best travel apps for your next vacation. These apps are the most useful for planning a trip, getting around, and saving money along the way!
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Booking:
Wego lets you scour more than 700 websites at once for the lowest prices on airfare and hotels.
While it’s not an app, Google Flights is also a helpful tool for tracking flight prices over a period of time.
Airport Dining:
Gate Guru provides a list of eateries (and shops) by terminal for most major airports.
Grab takes it a step further, and allows you to view menus and place orders for pick up. This is especially great for those quick layovers where you are starving but are short on time.
Lodging:
There are countless options to research where to stay. We often start with TripAdvisor and then go from there. Sometimes we stay at hotels and sometimes we stay at an AirBnB.
Hostelworld is a great app for budget travelers. You can chose from over 35,000 properties worldwide!
One Night (similar to Hotel Tonight) is great for a last minute trip or a staycation. It offers discounted rates for same day stays in a handful of major cities across the US.
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Navigate:
Cool Cousin is filled with collections of off the beaten path recommendations from savvy residents in major cities worldwide. Their suggestions are not one’s you find in a typical guidebook, allowing you to live more like a local.
Walc is a great app for the directionally challenged as it provides directions based on easy to spot landmarks.
Around Me is awesome for locating something specific close to you. Craving a cup of coffee? It will show you the coffee shops closest to you. Almost out of gas? It pulls a list of the closest gas stations.
Planning:
Planchat is a great app for group travel. You can construct your own itinerary and add restaurants and sightseeing ideas plus keep track of expenses.
If you despise the process of planning a trip, Journy is the app for you! It’s a travel agent and concierge rolled into one. For a fee (starting at $15 per day) this service will construct a highly detailed itinerary for you.
G.Spotting (from Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop) offers over 25 destination guides curated by Goop editors.
Language and Currency:
Duolingo is a FREE language app that is actually fabulous. We used it to brush up on our French before heading to Paris last spring.
Google Translate is very helpful for translating street signs and menus. You can type in the word, or even simpler, take a photo of it!
GlobeConvert is helpful for quickly converting prices into your native currency, but it can also convert things like speed and temperature.
Bonus Travel Tips:
Be sure to review your phone carrier’s international plan. An international plan can be pricey! We never get an international plan, and instead turn off our cellular data to avoid roaming charges and only use wifi. There are so many places with free wifi in most cities that we’ve never had an issue connecting when we need to. Just keep in mind that most of your apps will not work unless you’re connected to wifi. You’ll need to plan ahead, especially with maps. Use the Offline Areas and Download features in Google Maps to save maps and directions to your phone. Or you can always use a good old fashioned paper map! 🙂
Your turn! What travel apps do you use on vacation? Let’s start a discussion in the comments and help each other out!
-Ash xx