Travel Apps can make life so much easier when you’re on the road. They’re great for helping you track all of your travel information, find the best place to stay and the easiest way to get there. There are so many different ones out there, but here are 5 of my favorites and they’re all free!
What It Is: A Flight Monitoring App
Why I Like It: I can watch for flights, for certain times of year and get advice on whether to buy now or wait.
How It Works: Type in where you are and where you want to go. It brings up a color-coded calendar for you to see how the costs of flights look for the next few months. Select the dates you want. Hopper evaluates all your options and gives its price prediction for that route and those dates. You can explore flight options or put the flight on a Watch List. Hopper will give you a notification when there’s a drop in price and it’s a good time to buy.
What It Is: An Itinerary Management App
Why I Like It: I forward all of my trip details – flights/trains, hotels, reservations for activities or dinners, etc. – quickly and easily via email. It collects them all in one spot so I don’t have to print everything out or try to find them in my email while I’m traveling. It also gives me notifications along the way if my flight is delayed or gate changes. Granted, I also have my airline and hotel apps too – but for convenience, I like having everything in one place sometimes. Plus, if I’m traveling with someone, or want to keep family appraised of where I am or what flight I’m on, I can easily share a trip with them.
How It Works: When I get my confirmation email, I just simply forward it to TripCase. It puts together the trip with other components based on matching dates, cities, etc.
What It Is: A Customizable Map App
Why I Like It: I can build a map of things I might want to do in a city. (Plus, I can categorize and color code it!) This gives me a visual of where things are that I want to see and where they are in relation to each other. This helps me see for instance, what area of town I should look at for a hotel. Or, where things are in relation to each other, so I can easily figure out my day and visit things that are close together instead of backtracking because I didn’t realize that the two street murals I want to photograph are actually on opposite sides of town, or that the restaurant my mom recommended was two blocks away from the museum exhibit I went to! Truthfully, I find it easiest to make the map on my computer, but I use the app to reference it on my phone while I’m traveling. I select my city and see all of the markers I’ve placed. If I click on a marker and swipe up, I can see any details – address and contact information come up automatically for many places, and sometimes –> I’ll add in notes about the days/hours it’s open or admission fees.–> I might also find a picture to insert into the map, particularly if it’s a piece of street art I’ve heard about and am trying to track down – both for a reference of what I’m looking for and where I’ll find it when I get there.
What It Is: A Transportation App
Why I Like It: This app makes it so easy to figure out how to get around in a city! When I type in a location, it gives me multiple options and lets me choose – do I want to walk? Take the subway? Get a Lyft? The only downside is that it doesn’t work in every city yet – but many major ones are here. It’s been especially nice in international cities – I’ve used it in both Paris and Melbourne with great success.
How It Works: Type in where you want to go. Look at the different options: walk, bike, Uber, Metro…Get directions. I love that the Metro directions will tell you how many stops to get to yours – it even gives you the list of other stops in between so you can follow along to make sure you’re going in the right direction. (I mean, not that I’ve ever done that but you know, just in case…) It even gives you advice on which subway car to sit in! You can get guided, turn-by-turn directions as you walk/bike/drive to your location. I especially enjoy the cheeky information of how many calories (cheeseburgers, lattes) you’ll burn by walking.
What It Is: A Budget-Tracking App
Why I Like It: I have a strict budget on my trips for my blog and let’s be honest, budgets aren’t easy to keep when you’re on vacation! It’s so easy to get distracted by everything fun when you’re traveling and keeping track of what you spent is so not fun. But this app makes it very easy! I can watch what I’m spending along the trip and even capture receipts for all those tax things at the end of the year.
How It Works: I enter my trip, dates, budget, and currency. To make an entry, I type in the amount, select cash or credit card and select a category. Then, I type in the name/description of the cost and have the options to –> take a photo of the receipt or add in a note. Then, at the end of my trip (or, end of my year) I have a quick and easy recap of all my trips and their budget including receipts!
These are some of my favorite apps, but I’d love to hear about yours – tell me in the comments below which travel app is your favorite!
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Note: all links are for your convenience only, I am not an affiliate of any company and do not make money off recommending them. I just want to make it easy for you to find them if you’re interested!
What a helpful article about travel apps! I haven’t heard of MANY of these and need to download a few of them ASAP.
The budget tracking app could be very useful. We’ll have to look into that one. Does it also keep an itemized list for tax purposes at the end of the year?
Isn’t TripCase amazing?! I love that app. I’ve not used the others but definitely want to check out Hopper – that one sounds extremely useful for getting cheaper flights. Always down for saving money! 🙂
Hopper is really helpful! And, also fun to play around with when you don’t know where you want to go – keep trying different cities for your date (or different dates for your city) until you find a flight you like!
This is great, we use a lot of apps for travelling but non of these, I will have to give them a go. I think the transport app will be really useful for us. We use Map.me for our offline maps but we will have to try My Maps too.
Enjoy – I hope you find that they work well for you!!
I’m ALWAYS on the lookout for new, useful travel apps and I’m excited about discovering three in this post: Tripcase, MyMaps and CityMapper! I think I’m most excited about Tripcase because I already put all my confirmations into a folder in my email, but having an app where they are all right there AND you can share with other is spot-on fabulous! Thank you for making my travel more organized!!
You’re welcome! I’m glad you found some new apps to try – hope they work for you and make things easier! Tripcase is so convenient to keep everything together and let you find confirmation numbers & address so much faster!
I have never heard of tripcase but it looks fabulous. At this point I just do screenshots of everything but this would work so much better.
It’s super convenient to have everything in one place! And, makes it easy to share with someone if I want them to know my travel info, too.
These are really good apps. Until now, I always built maps after I’d been to a place to include it in my blogposts – but it’s true, it’s great for planning, too. I’m checking public transportation and connections on google maps – works for many, many places incl. schedules and everything, really good.
I find I tend to check Google Maps and Citymapper both – their information is often the same, but sometimes there’s a slight difference that can make an impact in traveling decisions!
I’ve never heard about those apps but I use something equivalent for each one. For city mapper for example I use an app called Rome to Rio that does the same thing. The budget planning app is interesting I’ll check it!
Oh, I came across Rome to Rio recently and like that one a lot, too!
I’ve recently started using Hopper and I love it! These are all great suggestions. Will have to check out TrabeePocket, that one sounds super helpful for budgeting, an area I can always use some help with.
It’s a great way to easily track costs during the trip and that makes all the difference to staying on track!
Although I’ve heard of a couple of these, I don’t actually have any of them downloaded to my phone! I will have to get installing hehe! The map ones would be particularly useful for when I’m planning walking routes x
Yes, it’s very useful for making your own walking tour in a new city!