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Ten smartphone and tablet travel apps for business or pleasure

Bevil Wooding
Published: 
Thursday, July 19, 2012
Technology Matters

 

A smartphone or tablet can be an indispensable travel companion for the business or leisure traveller. With the right apps, you can transform your mobile device into a virtual electronic Swiss Army Knife, performing the functions once reserved for dedicated devices. But with more than a million apps on offer across the Apple, Google, BlackBerry and Microsoft app stores, where do you start? The apps below should be more than enough to get you through your business or vacation travel.
 
Getting there
These apps will help you plan your trip and make the most of your in-transit experience.
 
 
Kayak
Kayak is a popular search engine for hunting down cheap tickets. Its free mobile app includes flight, car and hotel search and bookings. Kayak’s flight tracker and MyTrips feature keeps your itinerary at your fingertips and provides e-mail alerts of flight delays or gate changes.
 
 
Trip Advisor 
A good hotel can make or break your travel experience. The popular travel review site Trip Advisor has free mobile apps that allows you to search the same ratings directly from your smartphone or tablet. From the app, search cheap flights, along with restaurant, hotel, and attraction recommendations.
 
 
FlightAware
Free flight tracking app provides real-time flight information. Track upcoming and in-air flights. Check gate assignments, delays and cancellations and use the attractive in-air map to see a flight’s progress. You can also save flight itineraries and add your own notes. 
 
Gate Guru

There’s nothing worse than being lost, hungry and bored in a terminal. Gate Guru offers airport advice, GateGuru covers more than 180 airports across the US, Canada, Europe and Asia providing maps detailing airport amenities, gate locations, check points and tips on how to get around or what to look for.

 

Share the moments

 


 
360 Panorama
Sometime you may want to capture a beautiful scene, but the frame is too big for your camera. 360 Panorama allows you to get the full picture. Using a collection of snapshots that capture every part of a scene, 360 Panorama stitches the pictures together for a seamless and beautiful panoramic view. 
 
Skype
No matter where you travel, it’s important to stay in touch. When moving out of your service providers’ coverage areas switch to apps like Skype to make video and voice calls over WiFi to loved ones and friends. Viber, Tango and Line are other options on the go.
 

On the ground 

 

City Maps 2Go
When data connectivity is limited during travels, it’s handy to have a road map for the journey. City Maps 2Go has more than 700 maps worldwide for offline viewing. From street names to points of interests, the app makes it easy to find your way around a new city. 
 
 
Lonely Planet Travel Guides
Take the BBC’s popular Lonely Planet Travel Guides (Free) with you wherever you go. You can also try out Triposo for up to date travel guides for more than 8,000 destinations. 
 
 
Google Translate
If you need a multilingual mobile translation tool, Google  Translate can you access to thousands of conversational phrases and verb conjugations, among other things, for more than 60 languages.
 
 
OANDA currency converter
Currency Converter by OANDA is one of the quickest and easiest to use currency converters. With the ability to keep seven of your most commonly-used currencies on the screen, it is ideal for frequent flyers.
 

Lagniappe 

 

 
If you’re the literary type, Kindle, Kobo and Nook all have smartphone and table apps for your e-book reading pleasure. 
If shopping or dining out is on your agenda, you’ll want to try out Yelp!, Urbanspoon. Of course, be sure to have your calorie counting, fitness app with you. Try Nike Training Club. News aggregation apps, like Pulse, Flipboard and Google Currents, help you stay on top of news events at home and around the world. File sharing apps, like Box.net, DropBox, Google Drive and Microsoft SkyDrive, help you back up and sync your documents on the go. And even if you can’t find dedicated mobile apps for your phone or tablet, fear not. A growing number of Web sites are designed especially for mobile devices. 
Chances are, if you have a WiFi connection, you can browse to the Web version of many of the mobile services above. 
 
 
Enjoy your travels
 
Of course, there are tonnes more apps out there to help make your trip productive and memorable. In this era of smartphones and tablets, planning a vacation without mobile travel apps is equivalent to leaving home without your toothbrush. The best travel apps for business or vacation trips help you find what you need, get where you’re going and have fun along the way. 
 
 
Bevil Wooding is an Internet strategist with the US-based research firm, Packet Clearing House and the chief 
knowledge officer at Congress WBN, an international non-profit organisation.  
Follow on Twitter:  @bevilwooding, and 
Facebook: facebook.com/bevilwooding

 

 

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