THE BEST APPS TO TRAVEL SMARTER AND BETTER

We all plan holidays and trips. But the key to cracking the perfect getaway starts from your fingertips. Or rather, which apps they traverse before you travel. Believe it or not, gone are the days of Google Maps where you could look at the destination for a visual fancy with nothing more than time and distance info. With truckloads of Smart apps related to travel, you can plan your travel in more magical ways than you can imagine. Below is our curated list of some of the best ones out there.

So lets start with the very first step of planning a vacation.

SEARCH & BOOK

SKYSCANNER

Flight prices can fluctuate even during you do comparisons across different sites. SkyScanner aims to target that pain point and save your time. You see, it's not just a search engine that helps you compare flight prices in real time but also send you updates in price changes via email. You can filter results according to airline, direct flights, in-flight services, departure time, price and duration. It has an "Explore our map section, where you can input your destination and view the flight prices on a day-to-day basis. That helps you take an informed decision about which days offer flight discounts. On the other hand, choose your month of travel, and the app suggests the most convenient airline, countries or cities according to your budget.

Free

Android, iOS

SEAT61

Seat61 is a travel website run and maintained by a former railway-man from the UK. So what's so special, you may ask. Well, the reason we are featuring it here, is that this is arguably the only website that can give you the info about how to travel the entire world only by railways. Want to notch up a Guinness record for worldwide travel only by railways? Maybe this site can help! The founder of this website, Mark Smith, by the way, travels only by Seat No. 61. Just some trivia. But if this strange quirkiness is anything to go by, his website's thoroughness for details is laudable. Take any country in the world from USA, Europe, UK, South Africa to New Zealand and India, all information regarding railways is present. Cross entire continents without flying, with tips about travel and discounts. It was a pleasant surprise to find help even about the Indian Railway network here.

RAILYATRI

If it's Indian Railways all through the journey, RailYatri is the app. Yu can book your tickets through agents authorized by the Indian Railways, check your PNR status and receive real time updates regarding your train schedules. The icing was tracking your train in Maps. RailYatri serves as a compendium of all the timetables of all the Indian trains, down to the last detail like berth position and availability of seats etc. One particular thing we loved about this app is the provision to input your seat number and station and order food too! Apart from inter-city travel, commuters in cities such as Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai, with a healthy local metro network can access info about metro train schedules and routes too. There is also provision for a medical emergency situation with listings of hospitals closest to your location.

Free

Android, iOS

"NOT ALL THOSE WHO WANDER ARE LOST.
J.R.R. TOLKIEN

ORGANISE & PLAN

GOOGLE TRIPS

Like all things Google, a product from their stables is bound to blow away the competition. And this app does just that in the travel organizing category. Picture this: You have a travel itinerary laid out, but the mess of getting to organize it through different apps and notebooks etc. will eventually lead to travel fatigue. Trips app allows you to sign into the app and have all your travel plans laid out, which includes your hotel reservations, bookings at restaurants and car rentals. And all of this destination wise. That means the reservations appear only according to your location, so it is pretty chronological and linked to your gmail. The app classifies each trip as a "card. Each card has all the categories associated with travelling to a certain place like say Things to Do, Plans for the Day and Food and Drink. Optimize your schedule according to the cards and the app will throw up all suggestions for landmarks, popular attractions and restaurants. You also get to browse through others reviews and photos posted by other fellow travelers, so that you can take an informed decision about the place. It also has the much loved offline feature, where you can download huge amounts of info about a particular location via WiFi and then access it in no data coverage zones.

Free

Android, iOS

TRIPCASE

Now there are some of us, who think Google is becoming a bit too powerful and don't want it gaining too much influence in your day to day activities. But the irony being that Google does a darn good job at the user experience aspect of everything they do (Not counting Google Plus). However, for all the conspiracy theorists, there is an alternative which also delivers quality wise. Once registered with Tripcase, all your booking confirmation emails are sent to trips@tripcase.com. This becomes the single point of contact for you. Create a personalized itinerary, manually book flights, reserve train tickets, reserve your hotel rooms and more. All these are listed in a similar "card format in vertical timeline order. Listed alongside are the helpline numbers of all the airlines and hotels where you have booked yourself. Notifications for your scheduled activities and flight bookings are given so that you don't miss out or run dangerously late. Tripcase especially caters to the group of travelers. It allows everyone to be listed according to their email addresses in the plans. Any change in plans are automatically notified to the entire group.

Free

Android, iOS

"WHEREVER YOU GO, GO WITH ALL YOUR HEART

-CONFUCIUS

NAVIGATE

MAPS.ME

This navigation app lets you download all the information needed about your destination right from the entire map data along with routing information too on your local drive on the phone. You can access it later anywhere without an internet connection. Just decide on the location and download all the data pertaining to that. It allows you to create your way-points too for offline use later. Extremely useful when you plan a cross-country bicycle trip or somewhere off the grid. Even without a data connection and just GPS enabled, you can track your pre-fed waypoints. Apart from pre-fed waypoints bookmarked in this app, it also lets you import way-points set in other map services.

Free

Android, BlackBerry, iOS

SIDEKIX

You are dying to paint the town red in which you just landed with your antics. But you are starved for the best hangouts, clubs or restaurants. Sidekix is an exploration app meant for the urban jungle. It blends the features of Google Maps with features of Yelp, offering city guides entirely downloadable for later offline purposes. Major cities like Los Angeles, Albuquerque and St. Louis and especially in the United States are well represented. This might come in handy when you want to earn some brownie points with your overseas boss while you are on deputation there. Similar to Maps.me, here too, you can loaf around the by lanes of whichever city you are in with just your GPS enabled, and make sense of the must-dos around you. You can read customer reviews of coffee shops, restaurants, pubs, stores and nearby parks. One heads-up though is that it consumes a lot of battery. Better to start the day with a full charge.

Free

Android, iOS

TRAVEL JOURNAL

POLARSTEPS

All of us probably remember the flight path of Indiana Jones on a map laid out. Similar to that, Polarsteps uses location based organization of your photos. It simplifies the tedious process of posting photos to your Facebook wall, and instead allows your followers to have a pictorial log of your travel itinerary. Add your pictures and notes and keep your followers updated. You can also choose to keep your journey and photos private, and also share it with only people you want. There's also a statistics section which keeps track of the distance covered, places visited and much more to go back and ponder on.

Free

Android, iOS

JOURNI

What makes Journi unique and recommendable for the traveler is its ability to invite and collaborate with fellow travelers. Consider it as a Facebook for travel. You can create a single notebook or a journal just for yourself, or even create a journal and make it public for everyone to see, or even invite only a select number of fellow Journi travelers. Your invited friends can contribute with just simple words, photos, location info, and also tag posts such as restaurants, shopping, skydiving etc. Just like Polarsteps, you can follow other travelers from around the globe and even trade travel advice. The cherry on top is its offline feature.

Free

Android, iOS

PERSONAL SAFETY

GLYMPSE

There are some places and cities in the world, where you would want to wander alone and truly be lost. But having some precious precautions won't hurt. You get truly lost in a city which doesn't speak your language, then you are in trouble. Glympse allows you to send periodic SMS, emails and updates via social networks to your list of contacts. Your contact list gets a web link which allows them to track your whereabouts real time. Glympse also allows you to choose how long or time duration of the intervals at which you want your contact list to be updated about your location. The app requires internet access though. With the help from your friends, you can get help for directions about the place you are in.

Free

Android, BlackBerry, iOS, Win Phone

SITATA TRAVEL SAFE

Before making travel plans to any city in the world, it doesn't hurt to have some detailed information about the pros and cons of your destination. Schedules and plans aside, most of the times, travelers throw caution to the wind by not thinking of health and safety. Sitata is a service that pre-warns you of certain dangers, tourist traps, a viral outbreak particular to that region or even regarding the political situation regarding the destination country. It notifies you about latest developments which might have a possible impact on your schedule, and also a cool map feature which marks countries as "Do not Travel or "Caution. It has a guide section about personal safety as well which you might want to pre-download as this app requires an active net connection.

Free

Android, iOS