As smartphones overtake personal computers as the preferred web browsing and productivity devices, many travellers rely on specialised software products to plan their vacations. We have selected these eight time-tested products that have assisted thousands of users in planning their vacations.
TripIt: Travel Planner
TripIt helps travellers to organise all their travel documents and itineraries in one place. It is easily integrated with Siri on Apple’s gadgets allowing you to find the required information stored in the app via voice commands. It also lets us send your trip plans to other persons with whom you need to coordinate your travel plans. The key limitation of the TripIt app is its requirement to have an annual subscription even if you want to perform some basic tasks like tracking reward miles or monitoring seat upgrades.
Google Trips
The Google Trips app uses the powerful data-crunching capabilities of the Google platform to assist you in planning all elements of your trip. It offers customised tours and maps and shows all places of interest in the near vicinity of the locations you are planning to visit. Google Trips can also upload all information regarding flight departure times and reservation confirmation details from your Gmail account and neatly organise this data in the app. Despite being completely free, Google Trips is a bit difficult to navigate when compared with other apps dedicated to travelling.
Trip Advisor
Trip Advisor does a dependable job of booking of hotels, flights, and restaurants, which is highly convenient for planning your vacation. It also gives you access to nearly 500 million real-life opinions from other travellers seeking to assist their peers in making informed decisions. A great feature of the app is its forums section where you can get timely answers to your travel-related questions. Nevertheless, Trip Advisor’s default rankings do not correlate with customer reviews making it imperative for you to conduct further research before finalising your decisions.
Roadtrippers
If you travel to large and expensive capitals, it would be wise to research in advance which tourist attractions are available in these destinations for free (e.g. the British Museum in London). Roadtrippers allows you to find all tourist attractions in any specific destination. Another unique feature of this app is its capability to list all sights, motels, and restaurants located between the set starting and ending points. However, the app has poor GPS coordination, which may be detrimental to your travel experience.
Kayak
Kayak is the best app for people who have not yet decided upon their preferred vacation destination. It searches hundreds of travel sites and provides the best deals on hotels, flights, and local transportation options based on your maximum budget. Kayak also provides powerful vacation organising functionality including the capability to use your phone camera for measuring your luggage dimensions to calculate approximate airport fees. However, Kayak does not always show all of the flights available for certain destinations, which can result in missing some lucrative offerings.
PackPoint
PackPoint helps you to pack the things required during your vacation. The app provides you with a sample packing list calculated on the basis of the preset trip duration, weather forecasts, and preferred activities. It can also dynamically appraise your packing needs by taking into account the facilities available at a location. For example, PackPoint calculates the clothes you need to carry for your location depending upon the availability of laundry facilities. Unfortunately, the app interface requires you to start from the beginning every time you change your trip duration.
Hopper
Hopper uses predictive analytics to help you make your reservations and book flights at the cheapest possible price. The app’s proprietary algorithm predicts future flight and lodging costs so that you could wait until the right moment and spring into action. Hopper’s watch feature sends push notifications to your mobile phone whenever a good deal becomes available so that you will not miss it. However, the app does not monitor several major airlines, which can result in the omission of some good flight deals.
Skiplagged
Skiplagged helps you get some of the best flight and hotel deals for your vacation. The app also shows you the fares to connecting cities that can be lower than the direct flights to that city. In some cases, staying at a layover location and waiting for a connecting flight may be substantially cheaper than getting to the preferred destination right away. Skiplagged also helps you book last-minute hotel deals. Unfortunately, this app does not provide good results all the time as it only monitors popular airports.
The vast information available on the internet can make it difficult to plan the details of your vacation without external assistance. We hope that these eight useful apps suggested above will allow you to streamline the process of planning your dream trip and enjoy your next holiday.
Author Bio
Anna Clarke is the owner of online writing company 15 Writers. She is a successful entrepreneur with over 20 years’ experience in freelancing, academic dissertation writing consulting, specialising in Business, Economics, Finance, Marketing and Management.
