Essential Travel Apps

One of the activities that has benefited most from the emergence of sophisticated mobile devices has been travel! Before it was so hard to navigate in unknown places, communicating with different areas of the world was difficult, and trip planning was a nightmare. Nowadays with all the amazing apps that are available traveling has become so much easier and more accessible to all. Below are a list of the apps that we would not be able to travel without.

Google Maps

The best and most reliable way to get around. Provides driving, walking, and even transit directions so that you always know how to get to where you want to go.

Trip Advisor

So useful for finding awesome hotels, restaurants, and activities to do wherever you are visiting. We have used this to find so many activities we never would have thought of in the past.

Whatsapp

Great way to communicate with pretty much anyone in the world. It is the most widely used communication app and provides voice and video calls now making it super convenient to keep in touch with anyone. Viber, Skype, iMessage, and Facebook Messenger are also good alternatives here.

Uber

So easy to find transportation to get around wherever you are. If Uber is not available in the area, Lyft or MyTaxi are just as useful and easy to use.

Here Maps

Google Maps is the king when it comes to navigation, but Here Maps has been providing offline maps for a long time and they do a great job of providing a great alternative for those times when you don't have an internet connection. Just download the map of the country before leaving and you should be good to go.

Mobile Passport

This is literally a life changer and makes going through customs a breeze. When we came back from one of our international trips and saw a two hour line on one side and a completely empty line for Mobile Passport users, our eyes filled up with tears of joy.

Yelp

Great alternative to TripAdvisor especially when it comes to finding great restaurants to eat it wherever you are.

Instagram

This is the perfect way to share all the amazing memories we capture while on the road and makes it so easy to share to multiple different social media networks meaning you can snap, post, and continue enjoying the adventure.

snapseed

There are many many great photo editing apps on the various app stores, but as far as free apps go there aren't too many as easy to use and packed with features as SnapSeed. Make your phone pictures look much better in a flash so you can look like a pro photographer while on the road.

Google Translate

This is a lifesaver for those times where communication is too difficult without speaking the same language. When traveling to very exotic locations it is safe to assume there won't always be a speaker in your native language to help translate so this handy app can provide a lifeline.

Trello

This is our favorite app for planning trips! By allowing you to visualize everything you need to prepare and all the things you want to do in columns it becomes so much easier to manage all planning activities, especially among multiple people. You can create cards with different things that need to be done and those cards can be assigned to different people. In addition, you can add checklists, notes, and attachments such as pictures/screenshots/maps/etc to refer to while you are on your trip. And the best part? After a recent update, you can now take your boards offline so that you can have access to your trip plans no matter where you are.