Essential Travel Apps You Need to Download Before Your Next Trip

It is one of the most exciting activities that you can do, to plan a trip; to choose the destinations, to outline the experience, and to visualize the journey. But it may be sickening as well. Booking flights, good accommodations, budgeting and navigating through a foreign city may soon turn into a stressful process.

We are lucky enough to live in the era, when technology turned traveling into a smoother, smarter and more entertaining process. The right travel app is your travel assistant on paper, but in digital form – he can organise your trip schedule, find the best price, translate other languages and even get you to that off-the-path cafe.

Whether you are a regular traveler or are about to take your first big trip, these are the necessary travel apps that can save you time, money, and hundreds of headaches, and can make you concentrate on what is really important in your life being in the place and creating memories.

Going on vacation and want to download some apps that you must have the next time? Read this list of travel applications

1. Google Maps

Going anywhere, Google Maps is an indispensable commodity. It is not a map, but your one stop shop book to the world around you. Whether it is real-time directions, live traffic updates and even reviews of restaurants in your area, this app will never make you get lost.

Offline maps can also be downloaded, and this will be helpful where internet connectivity is no more or where international roaming is blocked. It is accurate, efficient, and relaxing whether you need to find your way around the small streets of Paris, are going to hike somewhere in Bali, or are just going to the closest ATM; Google Maps helps you out.

Trick: To create your own map of places to visit, restaurants, landmarks or hidden gems, create such lists and save them as a List.

2. TripIt

The organization of travel plans can be a mess – flight confirmation in one mail, hotel reservations in another and rental options somewhere at the bottom. TripIt makes it all simple by producing one convenient itinerary that is easy to read.

All you have to do is send your confirmation e-mails to TripIt, and everything is sorted out by the application into a timeline, including the time of flights, the time of hotel entrances, the transportation information and so on. It also gives you instantaneous flight notifications, gate adjustments and also notifications.

Best of all? You can get to your plans offline. Even when you are off the grid you will have it all in your pocket.

3. Hopper 

Are you sick of having to second guess your flight booking? By using billions of flights daily, Hopper removes the guesswork in pricing airfares by making predictions on how the future will be priced. It informs you whether to book immediately or not, and this way you are likely to get the best offers, before prices go up.

You will be able to save destinations in terms of alerts which will notify you once the price falls. Hopper does not only follow flights, but it will also assist in finding cheap hotel accommodations and car rental, which is invaluable to the low-end traveler.

Travel Hack: Hopper has a color-coded calendar that will show the lowest cost days of the week to book the trip, ideal in terms of flexible schedules.

4. XE Currency

One of the most difficult aspects of international traveling is currency confusion. This is solved by XE Currency which gives you real time exchange rates and a convenient currency converter which is also functional even when you are offline.

You can spend in Milan, haggle in Bangkok, or tip in Toronto, but this application has you just knowing how much you are spending. You are also able to keep track of several currencies at once– this is essential to those who are traveling a multi-country trip.

It is fast, dependable and it can assist you in planning your money spending without having the shock of using the conversion math to the wrong.

5. Google Translate

Language should not be used as a reason to completely miss a destination. Google Translate can be used to translate instantaneously text, voice and even pictures in more than 100 different languages.

With your camera you can get signs, menus, and packaging translated live, which is great on those occasions when you happen to be in a foreign restaurant and you find yourself saying, I hope I did not just order squid eyes. Besides, one is also able to download languages when offline, which makes the communication process seamless even in distant areas.

This application is simpler to connect to people in the area and it is likely to find places that you would not have located in a guide book.

6. Skyscanner

Skyscanner is still among the best choices in the business when it comes to cheap flights. The application compares hundreds of airlines and travel agents to display the most lucrative offers on flights, hotels, and vehicle rentals all within a single application.

It can be used by spontaneous tourists because of its feature of Everywhere that displays the lowest prices of destinations in your home city. It is also cheap to plan the trip and environmentally friendly with the ability to filter by length, airline, amount of layovers, and other eco-friendly routes.

Pro Tip: Use price alerts to monitor fare changes to your favorite routes.

7. Airbnb

Airbnb is the application of choice of those who prefer unusual accommodation and authentic experience. Airbnb has the options of apartments in the cozy cities, fish mansions and even tree houses that almost meet all budgets and types.

Listings can be filtered according to amenities, location and host ratings. Moreover, at Airbnb, you can find experiences created by hosts, called Airbnb Experiences, in which hosts conduct a guided tour, workshop, or cooking course in their hometown and get to know the culture even more deeply.

Airbnb is not a place to stay, it is a portal into local life.

8. Rome2rio

Have you ever wondered how to move to a totally new country to point B? Rome2Rio has your back. All you need to do is to type in your starting and finishing points, and the app presents all the available means of traveling, including flights, buses, trains, ferries, and even routes by car.

It provides you with rough travel estimations, fares and operators so that you can plan effectively. Whether it is the way to go between London and Lisbon or need to understand how to travel between Bangkok and Koh Samui, Rome2Rio gives you an answer in just a few seconds.

It is the definitive destination planner to those who travel everywhere.

9. LoungeBuddy

Much longer layovers and flight delays do not necessarily imply boredom. LoungeBuddy provides the ability to find and reserve airport lounges worldwide without a first-class ticket or a membership.

The app gives specific descriptions, images, and reviews of every lounge to help you locate one that fits your requirements like you may want to screen quiet workspaces, showers, or even unlimited snacks and Internet connectivity.

All you have to do is to enter your trip information and LoungeBuddy will list the available lounges at your terminal. All of a sudden, waiting in the airport is an adventure.

Final Thoughts

Travelling in the current world does not necessarily mean being a stressor, but it can be hassle-free, knowledgeable and fun when the right digital equipment is in place. The apps can be seen as a virtual travel concierge, where all the booking and budgeting as well as navigation and translation are done conveniently.

These are some of the main apps you should equip your smartphone with before your next trip, since when the world meets technology the world literally becomes a world to touch at your fingertips.

Go home, download, plan and continue with your next adventure without any worries.