Make your travel experience smarter with these apps

Rather than travelling to a new city mindlessly, it’s always best to make use of an existing itinerary or prepare one by yourself. At least you’ll have planned your journey without having to waste time on picking the next destination on the spot. However, your trips can be made much more efficient than you think. It usually starts from picking your destination and then searching through travel blogs to get recommendations. After you’re done picking your destination, it comes down to booking your hotel at the most appropriate location at the most affordable prices. It’s natural you’d be visiting various places, so it’s always best to pick a hotel which isn’t too far from the tourist spots. Packing the right stuff is pretty important too. You wouldn’t want to reach your hotel room and find out that you forgot to carry your phone charger cable. Not just that, there are several essential items that you should be packing with your luggage, so making a list is essential.

If you’re visiting a foreign country or a region with a different language than the ones you know, you might face issues in communicating with the locals, reading signs and even sometimes finding your way around. The number of things you could do to make your life easier on a trip is endless. Ultimately, your objective should be to spend more time on admiring the location and not beating your head with packing, planning and communicating. Read on to discover ways in which you can enhance your travel experience using different apps.

When you’re done picking your destination(s), the first financial setback is booking your travel tickets. Whether you’re travelling by train or flight or bus, you should book your tickets way in advance to get the best prices. You will find several apps out there for booking tickets and functionally, they don’t have much of a difference. Essentially, any of the popular apps such as MakeMyTrip, Yatra, ClearTrip, etc., can be used. Our objective was to find a booking app that allowed us to seamlessly book tickets. We weren’t really looking for an app that offered something more than that. We found Yatra to provide these little features that make your booking experience quick. If you’re booking your flight tickets then you can verify whether the flight is on time and also perform web check-ins. As we mentioned earlier, from a booking point of view, the process is almost the same on the . So, when it comes to making a decision about choosing a platform to go ahead with, it’s all up to you depending on which interface do you prefer the most.

Unless you create a list of the items you need to carry for your trip, it’s highly possible that you might miss out on packing something. If it happens to be an important item, you’ll have to buy the same item after reaching your destination and eat into your travel budget. To avoid any such problems, you should give PackKing a try. Initially, we thought of recommending a good to-do list app. However, what if you don’t know what you need to carry? Well, PackKing provides a curated list of items that you should be carrying based a few factors. Before presenting the list, it will ask you certain questions to narrow down the items. It collects information such as your mode of travel, weather of your destination and finally, what are you packing for, ie, what type of activities will you be undertaking like basic touristy things, swimming, hiking, fishing, etc. In the next step, it creates your list and you can select whatever item you feel is important for your particular journey.

When you’re thinking of booking a hotel room, there are two things you need to consider. The first is the cost and the second is the proximity to the tourist spots you intend to visit. Naturally, there are numerous options to look at when you’re looking for hotel accommodation. Trivago does a great job of aggregating the prices of several hotels. The list is always extensive and you might just find one in your budget all the time. However, you should also know that as the price goes down, so do the facilities. So, either you’ll have to compromise on the price or some facilities. If you’re going on an international trip, you could try out Airbnb. You will surely get lower prices than luxury hotels while still enjoying the basic facilities. Sometimes, you might have to share your room with one or more people. However, that’s completely up to you and you can choose whether you want a shared accommodation or single. It’s always smart to book your hotel room in advance, maybe a month or two before. You’ll end up saving a considerable amount of money.

Trivago

You’re done with booking your travel tickets and hotel accommodation. What next? It’s time to sit down and plan out the locations and tourist spots that you want to visit. Either you can spend an entire day or two reading through travel blogs and picking the spots. Or you could simply download Google Trips. It’s a really useful tool that curates all the things you can do in that particular city. Right from the top-rated spots to special heritage locations and religious sites. The app lists down everything along with ratings, timings and reviews. All this data comes from Google Maps, so essentially, it’s more like a crowdfunded recommendation app. You can save your favourite locations so that you don’t need to find them again. It also lists down all the available transport options whether it’s by public transport, ferries or taxis. The required data can be downloaded and used from the phone offline, in case you’re going somewhere with poor data connectivity. When your flight tickets arrive in your Gmail inbox, it’s automatically pulled into the app. After you’re done picking your favourite spots, it’s time to create a scheduled plan.

Things are falling into place now. You have decided all the places you want to visit. To ensure that you don’t make plans on the fly, it’s essential to create a daily schedule. Of course, you can use your calendar for the same if you want to keep things simple. If you wish to step up your game and form a sort of timeline to view and remember how your trip is going to turn out, you should check out TripIt. The app allows you to plan your travel in a chronological order that can be viewed as a timeline. Right from the time you board the flight or train, until the time you return, you can list down everything in this timeline. You can save the trip containing all the details of the places you ate and visited. It will definitely work out in your favour if you’re taking another trip to the same city or recommending stuff to someone else.

It isn’t that difficult to lose track of the money you’re spending on your trip. You might have a fixed budget for the entire trip but that doesn’t mean you will be able to optimise the amount you’ll be spending. If you’re among the ones who fix a budget for your trips, then you should definitely sit down and plan how much you are willing to spend every day. For example, you could distribute your daily expenditure based on your planned activities such as museum tours or daily meals. At the end of the trip, you’ll be thanking yourself for having saved money rather than having to splurge extra cash. You could simply use a regular expense tracking app. However, they are usually combined with the rest of your expenses. In order to isolate your travel expenses, you could use Trabee Pocket. The app lets you plan the expenses of your travel by first asking for your total budget. You can either choose to add your expenses during your trip or you can add them beforehand. It has a simple user-interface where you can add your expense under predefined categories. The amount you enter will be automatically deducted from your total budget. As you continue spending, the same will keep happening for all the expenses. Finally, all your expenses will be listed down, labelled with dates and you will get to see whether you overshot your budget or not. This will not only help you save money but also provide  a way to plan budget trips without losing sight of how much you’re spending on a particular aspect, like food

or transportation.

Communication is important when you want to ask for directions or when you’re ordering food. If you don’t speak or understand the local language, it can be painful. But, you don’t really need to worry since Google Translate can take care of these problems. The app contains almost every language out there and it can be translated to every other language. Not just in the text form, it can also speak out the translated word(s) for you. Additionally, if you can’t read a sign or text, you can simply point the in-app camera and let it translate for you. This is done in AR mode and feels like a realistic overlay on the original surface. Another interesting feature is handwriting recognition. When enabled, you can simply ask the locals to write down in the local language and allow Google to translate it for you. If you’re travelling to non-English countries, this app is a must have.

On international trips, it’s always a good idea to keep a check on your expenses. However, if you’re dependent on cash and you exceed your budget, you will have to make a withdrawal or exchange your emergency cash. Hence, it’s always handy to keep a currency converter handy. Of course, you can do a simple Google search and find out. However, you will have the information ready for you in just one tap with xCurrency. You can keep up to eight currencies on the homescreen including the one based on your current location. The prices will convert on the fly wherever you enter the amount. You can swipe the currencies and replace them with your desired ones. Not just physical currencies, you can also can cryptocurrency exchange rates. It has a minimal design without unnecessary features.