Gone are the days when you needed to hire a travel agent to plan out your trip. Now you can do all the planning yourself, right from your smartphone.
You can book tickets, make restaurant and hotel reservations, find cool places to hang out, look up the history of the city you’re traveling to and get taxis or rental cars anywhere you are.
Top 5 Travel Apps to Make Your Journey More Exciting
When these apps make planning so convenient and hassle free, it’s easier to sit back and relax and enjoy your journey. Listed below are five of the best travel apps:
Hipmunk
This app is available for both Android and IOS devices. It is the finest in class when it comes to booking flights and hotels. The app is extremely easy to use and lets you find the best hotel and flight deals.
It has a clean design and a unique search filter for flights called Agony. What this does is that it shows you the flights with the least amount of layover and hassle first and then longer but cheaper flights later so that you can pick those that suit you best.
There is a filter for booking hotels called Ecstasy which sorts hotels while taking into account various factors such as price, amenities and guest reviews, to help you get the best overnight experience possible.
It also lets you create fare alerts for a particular search so the app can alert you when there’s a good deal on it. The app is free to download and use.
TripIt
This free app is available for both Android and IOS devices. Once you’re done booking flights and making reservations, you still have a lot of work left to do. There will be several emails in your inbox containing flight numbers, flight times, confirmation numbers and other important info and it can be a huge hassle to keep track of it all.
TripIt helps you organize all of that information into an active itinerary that you can access at any time on your phone. All you have to do is forward all the necessary emails to the app itself.
The app is really simple-to-use and is immensely helpful. It shows you your flight number, hotel reservation, rental car reservation, and even lets you save directions to your hotel in the itinerary and gives you weather reports for your journey there. The app works offline too so it’s there whenever you need it.
Google Translate
The app is available for both Android and IOS devices. Being in a foreign country and not knowing the local language can be an immensely frustrating experience. This is where Google Translate comes in the picture. It supports up to 90 different languages.
All you have to do is choose the language you want to translate from and the language you want to translate to and the app does the job for you. You can hear the written translation and save it in a digital phrasebook for later access.
It has a great new feature called Conversation mode, where it translates a spoken conversation between two people in real time. Just input the two languages that will be used and the app listens for a phrase, translates it, then speaks it out loud for the duration of the conversation.
The only downside is that the app can be a little too literal so sometimes colloquial phrases don’t translate properly. Another amazing feature is Word Lens, where you point the camera at a sign or phrase you want to translate and the app does it for you. The best part is that you can do all this offline so the app is always there for you. Plus, it’s completely free.
Foursquare
The app is available for both Android and IOS devices. Once you’ve traveled to a new place on your journey, you start looking for things to do. Foursquare shows you places of interests that you might want to visit, such as museums, monuments and parks. It even shows you the best places to eat and shop from.
While there aren’t any lengthy reviews on the app itself, other users leave by short reviews and tidbits about a particular place which are helpful. You can use the app to plan your trip before leaving your hotel by just entering the location you will be going to and then browsing through the various categories such as ‘Arts & Entertainment’ and ‘Nightlife’.
The app has a ton of recommendations for places to visit and its huge database ensures that it will have something for you, no matter where you are.
A new feature in the app called “What’s good here” pinpoints your location and then shows you the best places available nearby. If you’re sitting in a restaurant, the app will automatically give you tips about the place. All this is completely free.
LocalScope
This great new app is only available for IOS at the moment. What this app does differently than the rests that it collects info from various social media outlets and combines it to bring you information about whatever is going on near your current location. Unlike other apps though, it is completely social media powered. There is a broad range of social media sources for you to sift through. For example, if you are in a new city and you search for pasta, the app will search through different social networks such as Yelp and Foursquare and present the results to you in a list.
The app is really useful and lets you discover new things which you may not have found otherwise. The only downside is that the results vary according to how many people post about that place, so remote locations will not have many results. The app costs $2.99.
