the best travel apps

The purpose of going on a holiday is ditching the home front and to emerge yourself into your destination. I understand the concept, but I just don’t know how people manage without cell phones. Seriously, my phone is practically glued to my hand, even more so when I’m abroad for the following reasons.

pictures

Let’s just start off with the most obvious one out there. If you’ve got the new iPhone 6s then the resolution of the photos you’ll be making is much better than most digital camera’s. You won’t have to bring both a camera and a phone, win-win situation.

Booking Now

When it comes to the route I plan to make, I like to have it somewhat planned out before hand, but when it comes to the little details, I prefer to plan things last minute. You never know who you meet when you’re traveling, or perhaps you had plans to go to destination X but you’ve heard from various people that it’s not worth seeing. Long story short, spontaneity is going to make your trip even better than it already is. Enter: Booking Now. This app will show you all the nearest hotels and hostels and whether they’ve still got rooms available. It’ll save you heaps of time wandering around looking for a place to stay.

Tripit

My second favorite travel app. This app collects all the reservations you’ve made and shows them to you in chronological order – from flight tickets to hotel bookings. You’ll never have to dig into your mail box looking for that one flight ticket or print out those confirmation tickets.

uber

For some reason a lot of people seem to think that Uber is very expensive, but that’s definitely not the case, especially if you opt for Uber Pop. The huge advantage about Uber other than a regular taxi is that Uber can’t swindle you since the route you traveled ends up in your inbox. So the classic case of cab drivers making extra long detours for unsuspecting tourists is history.

Citymapper

Every big city with a subway can be found in this app. You type in your designated location and current one and the app will give you your best travel option. You can indicate whether you want to use just a metro or just a bus and it’ll even show you which options are ‘rain safe’ incase you decided to walk or cycle. Oh and another fun aspect: it shows you how many calories you’ll be burning if you do so.

Google Translate

When I was in Brazil last year I visited a tiny village called Paraty and spent about three hours at a local police office reporting a theft. The police officer spoke about zero words of English as did I Portugese. So we used my cell phone and Google Translate which made communicating much much easier. Seriously, this app will be your savior.

Currency Converter

Any time I’m in a different country, I always forget the name of the different currencies and refer to everything as ‘cheetos,’ a term I store from my parents who would always do the same thing. But sometimes you need to know how many cheetos you get for a euro and that’s where the currency converter comes in. There are various options in the App Store and most of them work offline too.