During the planning phase, and while in the midst of taking time off, you can rely on a number of excellent apps, websites, and services that can help put your mind at ease about your holiday.
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Here are the 20 best travel apps and services. For more advice about organising your travel, see http://pa-prive.com/best-apps-for-travel-theyre-free/
This is an app that helps you find the best day-of deals on a hotel room in top cities around the world. It works by showing you hotels that are offering last-minute deals on their unreserved rooms at highly discounted rates. You can then book your deal right from the app, which is available for both iOS and Android.
Stay.com lets you explore new travel destinations and cobble together a loose itinerary for what you might want to see, do, and eat when you arrive. Thus, the iPhone app largely does the same, while saving much of it for you to use offline. You can plan new trips from the app, as well as import itineraries you’ve designed on the website. The offline functionality, including maps.
An useful tool for comparing and finding the best deals on thousands of flight to anywhere around the world. You can access the app via the website or you can download it to your mobile. Once you decide on a flight to book, Skyscanner will link you directly to the airline or travel agent’s website to complete the process. You can also find and compare car rentals and hotels too.
Is a very handy app that I used a lot! made for super list makers . It helps you remember what to pack and can also serve as evidence of what you packed if your luggage were ever lost. You work from one of many sample lists of items to pack, or you can create your own and tick off items as they go into your luggage. It has a handful of other reminders, too, like booking reservations and watering the plants before you leave home. A great tool for people who are packing for multiple members as family, etc.
This is a good translation app that can instantly translate words from 12 built-in language dictionaries without accessing the web. It doesn’t currently have the ability to translate full sentences but is still a nice tool for looking up words on the fly.
TripTuner is a unique website that allows you to “tune” your preferences on a series of sliders and recommends destinations based on your choices. Choose whether you want your vacation to be more relaxing or active, high or low cost, etc. This app shows you new sets of destinations for you to choose from.
Helps keep you on schedule for flights and even provides maps of airports, which can get really tricky for business people who travel a lot. This app even hooks up with TripIt, which can create an entire travel itinerary for you and put it on your online calendar.
This is a handy hotel search site. Trivago searches multiple hotel booking sites at once from its current database of 157 different sites to bring you the best options for wherever you plan on staying.
It’s a free app. Don’t get lost on that new-to-you public transportation system. Plug your start and end points into HopStop to find out the best train or bus route in the city you’re visiting. The app is currently available for 16 cities, states and regions in the US and Europe
TripIt is my travel bible. Is a tool for keeping track of your itineraries all in one place, once you sign up you can email all your different confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com and the service will automatically create itineraries for you. You can then access them any time online or from your mobile device to view, customize or share them.
You can share your plans with fellow travellers, which helps you sync up with colleagues on your trip. TripIt for Teams is even more powerful, as it’s designed for business use. Once your travel plans are set, you can forward the travel agency, admin or itinerary e-mails to a Tripit inbox. The app then parses the itinerary for each person in your travel party automatically. Plans start at $29 per month and include a free 30-day trial.
If you travel on business then chances are you have an expenses account, which usually means collecting receipts and fiddling around with a spreadsheet when you get back to the office.
This extremely clever free app turns your receipts into a report automatically – well, it does involve a bit of user intervention but the paperwork hassle is largely removed. Simply take a photo of your receipt with your iPhone, press the upload button, and let the app book-keeping team enter the details for you and send you a monthly report. 5 minutes work in your hotel room at the end of the day and you are done.
Looking to learn a new language but don’t want to spend lots of money on classes or language software? Duolingo is a website that offers FREE courses in 6 different languages. One independent study suggested that 34 hours of Duolingo courses is comparable to one semester of a college language class. The languages currently offered are Spanish, English, French, German, Portuguese and Italian.
If you travel a lot by train, the National Rail app ticks all the right boxes. Not only does it provide real-time departure information, but being a clever app also knows where you are and when the next train home is.
The planner function will provide details of all available trains for your journey – accounting for any disruptions to service – and let you buy your tickets with the app.
*For those of us who get late trains and fall asleep after a hard days work, there’s even a wake up alert function so you don’t miss your stop.
The app is free, or £4.99 without advertising, and regularly updated.
Upload details about your trip to the this app directly or by emailing your itinerary or syncing with TripIt. The app then keeps you updated on all kinds of things like airport weather, flight status and even security wait times. Additionally, you can view a list of airport amenities to find the closest place to grab a pre-flight bite to eat or magazine. Plus many other features.
This new, free note-taking app for Android smartphones is ideal for executives on a busy schedule. The Google Keep interface is clean and uncluttered, so you can focus on jotting down thoughts. The basic idea: Type reminders, tasks lists and website links and save them for later use. On the plane, you can voice annotate a note and the app will convert what you say to text. You can snap a photo of a receipt, too. Using color-coded notes will keep everything organized on your PC once you’re back at the office.
Airbnb is a great resource for looking up all kinds of rental properties for your travel destination, from single rooms to whole homes or apartments. Simply enter your destination and the dates you plan on going to get a list of rentals and prices.
Is widely regarded as one of the best business management applications on the market. It was a pioneer in the field of over-the-air syncing and today manages to bring all your devices together seamlessly.
The app is slightly more expensive that others you may find, however the investment is well worth it. Its capabilities for project management, email, reminders and location aware contexts are fantastic. This app is a must for businessmen and women on the move.
With the app you can create budgets, track expenses and then send reports to yourself or your boss if you’re on a business trip. It allows you to attach receipts by taking pictures or selecting ones already on your iPhone. The app also integrates with TripIt to import trip segments and add them as expenses.
Never leave that vital document behind in the office again with LogMeIn. The remote access app was originally designed for IT admins, to help employees troubleshoot problems, however the developers have now launched a free version that can log in to up to 10 computers. This is perfect for businessmen and women on the move who can access multiple computers without having to email themselves documents. Its also perfect for situations where a business meeting goes off on a tangent, and you can access that one document you never thought to bring with you; a really handy app, which could seriously boost your productivity.
We hope that you find this list of resources useful for your future travels! Do you know of any other great travel sites or tools?
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