Most Useful Mobile Travel Apps for iPhone and Android: 12 Best Electronic Assistants to Organize Your Trip. Travelers, arm yourself!
Hi friends! I travel 10-15 times a year and without the convenient apps that are always at hand, my brain would break down, and my budget would suffer a lot. Traveling to new countries is difficult and costly without these assistants. In this review, I will tell you about the most useful programs for your gadget that I use myself. Go!
1. Search for tours
Do you prefer to have a vacation on a package? You don't need a travel agent at the metro office. They have only one interest - to sell you a tour at a higher price. I recommend people of the XXI century to search and buy tours using a smartphone. It happens that I urgently need to buy a last minute ticket when I am still abroad. How can you do this without a normal online service? No way!
I use Travelata, the best tour search app of all major tour operators. The service compares prices from 120 tour operators and shows you the best deals. It is easy to find hot tours for 5K, 10K, 15K rubles per person. Booking tours on your smartphone is convenient, fast and safe. The app has great user reviews and is updated every couple of months. Download the version for iOS or Android.
2. Search for air tickets
Air tickets are the first thing an independent traveler needs. And preferably cheaper!
I think that the best mobile application for finding tickets is from the well-known Aviasales... Comparison of prices among 700+ airlines, a price calendar, voice search, building complex routes, a map of low prices and a bunch of other useful features in one program. Download for Android or iPhone.
3. Search for hotels
I bought tickets - it's time to look for a hotel. Prices for the same hotel are not the same for different services - the difference can be 10-30%. Therefore, we need to compare all booking sites and find the best price. It knows how to do it Hotellook: Download for Android or iPhone. Install it on your gadget, and you can always quickly find an inexpensive hotel anywhere and anytime.
6. Offline maps
This is the most useful mobile app when traveling.
What does any traveler need? Of course, in the map! But a paper card is inconvenient, and online cards don't work without the internet. MAPS.ME and OsmAnd will come to the rescue - both work on the basis of Open Street Map and are almost identical, but the former has a more intuitive design.
These apps will help you get directions, find cafes, shops, ATMs, gas stations, attractions, and more. For offline work, download the map of the required country or region in advance. I use these programs on every trip: in the mountains, desert, jungle - wherever I find myself, it is easy to find the right road using GPS and these maps.
2GIS is an even more functional application with maps, but only for Russian cities.
5. Finding free Wi-Fi
Sometimes an Internet connection is urgently needed, but there is no mobile phone in roaming. A useful travel app will help you out Wi-Fi Map - it will find the nearest Wi-Fi points for you. Users share passwords for Wi-Fi hotspots, so you can even connect to a closed network! Works offline. Download for Android or iPhone.
6. Finding food
Food in local establishments is always tastier than in restaurants for tourists. Famous free apps Foursquare, TripAdvisor or Yelp can help you find a good place to eat. There are reviews, tourist ratings and more or less convenient filters for finding places by price level and type of cuisine.
7. Money
Very important! Install your banks' applications on your smartphones. So you can make banking transactions, monitor your balance and block your card in case of problems. Find out more about withdrawing and exchanging money abroad.
I also recommend all travelers to travel abroad with two Tinkoff Bank cards. In addition, now you can get them for free and test:
- All Airlines credit card: 10% cashback from hotels and car rental, up to 7% from air tickets, 2% from all other purchases + free annual honey. insurance + the ability to buy tickets for any airline for miles + a year of free service.
- debit Black: withdrawing money without a commission around the world + the ability to change the currency of your account (euros, dollars and others) in the application, so as not to lose a penny on conversion + 1000 rubles to the account when making purchases for 5000 rubles per month.
Read my detailed review of Tinkoff Bank and find out how to wisely save on travel.
Count your travel expenses in Finance PM. Just do not forget to add your expenses there, and at the end of your vacation, look at the report - you will find out where so much money went.
8. Taxi
When traveling, I try to travel by public transport - it's cheaper that way. But sometimes you have to take a taxi. To prevent sly taxi drivers from ruining you (especially when you need to go from or to the airport), use mobile car search applications. Install in advance Yandex.Taxi (Android or iOS) for Russia and foreign version Uber (Android or iOS) for overseas. If you are traveling with a group or family, Uber rides are often even cheaper than buses.
9. Lost in translation
Abroad without an interpreter is possible! I am using a useful application Google translate (for Android and iPhone). He also has a cool fiction - translation through the camera: point the lens at the text, and voila - more or less understandable text in a language you know. I advise you to translate not into Russian, but into English, otherwise the result in half the cases will make you laugh wildly (pearls are fierce there!). Download a dictionary of the languages you want before you travel. Alternative: ABBYY Lingvo dictionaries are another popular mobile application in this area.
10. At the airport
Very useful when traveling mobile Android app GateGuru will easily show you all the catering establishments and shops located near you at the airport, as well as reviews on them.
11. Communication
Viber, WhatsApp and Skype are useful applications for connecting with family, friends and foreigners. For example, it is convenient to correspond with the owner from whom you are renting an apartment. By the way, you can make calls from Skype to regular landline and mobile numbers - a paid service, but inexpensive. I had to call Sberbank support to unblock the card while traveling, and I used Skype.
12. Wine
I don't know about you, but I love wine! It is especially difficult to control yourself when traveling to the wine countries of Europe. I myself am never a sommelier, so I have to look for help when it comes to choosing a good wine.
Vivino is a cool, convenient and free mobile wine selection app. Launch the program, scan the label and get all the information you need: user rating, reviews, description of taste, characteristics, average price. Choose wines with a score of 3.8 or more. One drawback: you need internet.
Thanks to this useful application, I buy wines in Europe for 10-20 €, which cost 5000 rubles in Russia. The buzz!
