Tips For a Happy Traveler: 5 Best Websites to Check and Apps to Download
All great travel apps have one thing in common: they all solve problems you don’t even realise you have. Whether they’re helping you in easy and quick navigation, pointing you in the direction of authentic local nosh or simply showing you how to ask after a toilet in Japanese, you need to pick and choose which one works for you best.
Here are our picks of apps and websites for the best travel experience you can have:
Ultimate Travel Packing Guide
Do you travel often, reach your destination, unpack your things, and ask yourself, ‘Where is my toothbrush?’. It happens to the best of us because it’s far easier to create a mental list of things to pack in the week leading up to your departure than it is to actually remember them all when you’re packing. The logical thing to do would be to create a small travel pack or make a list of things to pack as you remember them. Ultimate Travel Packing List is a little web app that generates a list of things you should pack based on your gender, the length of your trip, the climate you’ll be experiencing, and the nature of your trip.
Seatguru
Which seats are the best seats on the plane? Since airlines began charging for everything from a checked bag to a bag of peanuts, the answer is, “Whichever ones I don’t have to pay extra for.” SeatGuru provides commercial cabin seat maps, advising travelers which seats in the cabin to select or not select when booking a flight. The free app lets you access over 700 seat maps from over 100 airlines. It features advice and insights drawn from over 45,000 passenger reviews, so you can always find the best seat before you fly. Plus, the new app now helps you compare and find great low airfares from low-cost carriers, big online travel agencies, and the airlines themselves. You can even set up real-time flight alerts that monitor your flight arrival time and other information.
Bing Travel App
The Bing Travel app lets you explore over 2,000 destinations from all over the world through beautiful photos and panoramas. Travel guides, booking tools, real time currency conversion, and weather provide everything you need to turn travel inspiration into your next great trip. Enable location services for Bing Travel Beta, so they can have more specific recommendations. For example, the destinations section recommends several places near New York. Each destination displays a summary syndicated from Frommer’s, traveler photos, attractions, restaurants, and hotels. Prices for hotel rooms are displayed by the app, grabbing rates from services like Booking, Kayak, Travelocity, Expedia, and more. Click on the rate you like and the web browser opens for you to continue the booking on that particular site.
Tripit
The iPhone app TripIt offers a unique service to travelers. It automatically connects to your email accounts, finds travel-confirmation emails, and turns them into a neat, complete itineraries. TripIt is familiar with purchases you make on all the major search and booking sites, such as Orbitz and Kayak, as well as airlines, car rental services, hotels, restaurant reservations, and much more. If TripIt misses an important travel email, you can forward it along, and the service will either figure out what to do with info or stick it to the side until you can review and type in the details manually.
Uber
Uber hit 100 cities recently, and what many call the fastest growing cab company in the world is adding more cities fast. When you open the app in any of the 100-plus Uber cities and order a car, the app will estimate the arrival time and send a text saying your driver is on the way. A small photo with the driver’s name and phone number pops up on the app, while a car icon on the map shows you in real time where the car is located. Cash isn’t an issue, Uber bills your credit card at the end of the ride. Both users and drivers can rate each other at the end of the ride using the app for other users to view. Rather than a cheap taxi app with prices similar to local cabs, in Asia Uber provides a luxury experience, with much higher prices and limo chauffeurs.
