If you’re planning to get away from all the summer heat and dust, there are 5 smartphone travel apps you may want to download before you set off. What are the most important things you need to consider before wanderlust takes over and rules you completely? Getting to your destination, seeing the unique sights, knowing how to communicate with the locals, the best food joints and a place to crash when weariness takes over, right?
1. TripIt: For an uncomplicated, hassle-free way of keeping it together while trying to remember flight information, hotel reservations, directions to various places and so on, TripIt will serve as your best personal secretary that fits in your pocket. You can also sync Google Calendar or Outlook data and get weather information on the areas you’re going to visit. Enough said, here are the iTunes and Google Play links to this travel app.
2. Google Translate: Unless you really don’t like talking to people or are hiking through uninhabited territory, forget about getting an app to find you the coolest places for sightseeing if you can manage to communicate with locals and find out for yourself. Available for iOS and Android smartphones, Google Translate does this best and currently supports 80 languages so you don’t really need to have a travel guide by your side.
3. Trip Journal: Google awarded Trip Journal a $100000 prize for its concept and design. The tool lets you do everything from trip tracking to recording to documenting your travels. It is currently being offered for Android, iPhone, Symbian and Facebook. The application features Google Earth integration and literally allows your friends and family to follow your adventures in detail by leafing through your full screen photos, videos, waypoints, blog entries and more.
4. Yelp: Yelp if you quickly scrolled through this lineup to see if we had any travel apps for foodies. That’s right, here’s an application which is the most divine when it comes to finding the best joints to snuff down a hot bowl of soup, a juicy leg of mutton and more. It has a nice augmented reality addition and user reviews are mostly dependable, if not always. Directions to eateries, phone numbers, opening/closing hours and so on are provided within the interface.
5. TripAdvisor: For those of you who were looking for an all-rounder when it comes to booking flight tickets, making hotel reservations, finding great places to dine at and things to do while on your summer holiday, TripAdvisor is a wholesome affair. Our vote is split in favor of this one and Airbnb since the latter delivers a more comprehensive list of choices to bed down at. You know, because not all of us are comfortable Couchsurfing.
We should also give a passing mention to GateGuru for finding ATMs/food haunts/gate locations at airports, Postagram, ICE, Google Maps offline and the Xe Currency conversion tool, while wrapping up this list of smartphone travel apps for your download list.