Best Travel Apps According To Bloggers

Gone were the days when travelers have to go to an agency or make several phone calls to arrange everything they need for their next trip. Thanks to advanced technology, people can now book all they need for their holiday using their mobile phone. With just a swipe of a finger, you can now book a flight, hotel and a rental car. We at VroomVroomVroom wanted to give the best car hire booking experience that’s why we have launched our iOS app to make it easier and quicker for our customers to rent a car.

We have also asked some of our travel blogger friends for their recommendations. Since they have been travelling constantly, they know which mobile apps would be quite useful. Check out their choice of top travel apps below and you may even discover how cool these apps are.

Will Tang of Going Awesome Places

Booking.com:  When it comes to hotels I’ve been recently using Booking.com more and more.  While the website will allow for better long-term planning, sometimes you need to find something on the fly or you need to manage your bookings.  The UI is easy to navigate and especially with their $40 rebate promo (limited time), there’s almost no reason to look anywhere else.

Skyscanner:  For flights, my go-to app now for searches is Skyscanner mainly because they have a really good way of doing open ended searches.  This means you can put an origin city and leave the destination open ended to literally “Everywhere” or country.  It makes finding cheap flights a lot easier and helps with spontaneous travel as well.

Uber: I’m finding that I’m using Uber more and more.  Everyone knows how easy they make grabbing cabs especially in the city.  The big incentive for me is that if you link up your account with SPG, you get points for every ride as well!  Make sure you use code willt1324ue to get a free ride up to $10.

Juli and Sam of Where is Juli + Sam

Airbnb: Instead of hotels, we often choose Airbnb. This allows us to meet locals, get to know the culture better and hear some valuable tips. Sometimes you can rent entire houses in top locations for a great price.

VroomVroomVroom: What’s better than a good road trip? Answer: Nothing. We love road trips and we rent cars all over the world. The VroomVroomVroom app helps us to find the best deals by comparing car rental prices all over the world.

Wikicamps: The most important app for anyone travelling around Australia – whether you’re heading away for a weekend camping trip or planning a big adventure. We also used the app in the States. The content within Wikicamps is user-generated. You can mark and rate campsites, viewpoints, interesting places.

Kach and Jonathan of Mr and Mrs Howe

Sailflow: As soon as you have anything to do with boats, it becomes essential to know everything about the weather, both future and present, sometimes even past. With our boat being on a mooring in the Florida Keys in hurricane season, we need to keep a constant eye on both short and long term weather events. Sail Flow is the best app we have found for staying ahead of what could be coming our way!

Navionics: Knowing the weather that you’re heading into is one thing, but knowing what’s around you and where you need to go is whole different ball game in the sailing world. There are so many variables that can affect where you want to sail, where you can sail and where you should sail. These three will rarely match up perfectly! Navionics is an app based electronic chart system that provides just as much navigational data as an expensive chart plotter, yet it’s portable and works on any iOS or Android device. For short trips and day sails, we could actually use this as our primary navigation system, but for longer journeys, it makes the perfect backup!

Skyscanner: We’re not a fan of having loads of apps on our phones, so when we find one that we like, we stick with it for as long as it keeps us happy! Our need to fly is going to decrease massively once the boat is ready for cruising, but we always like to be able to open our phone and check flight options in a few seconds if we need to. We especially love the “Check whole month” feature, as we are often flexible with our travel dates, so we can save a lot by travelling a day or two earlier or later.

Brittany Kulick of The Sweet Wanderlust

Snapseed: I love the photo-editing app, Snapseed. When I’m on the go, I love the ability to edit a photo on my phone so it’s ready to post to Instagram.

Airbnb: The Airbnb app makes it easy to search for and book accommodation anywhere in the world. Oftentimes, I can find private rooms that are cheaper than shared dorm rooms. I love meeting locals and getting to know a new city through their recommendations.

Pinterest: I use the Pinterest app as a virtual trip planner. I research places I’m planning to visit and store all the posts I can find on Pinterest until it’s time to actually book the trip. With Pinterest, I know I’ll never forget to visit those cave trampolines in Wales or the underwater winery in Croatia!

Skye Gilkeson of The Fit Traveller

Uber: Uber seems like an obvious choice these days because it’s so commonplace around the world. We use Uber in most big cities. It’s actually considered safer to use Uber than jump in a taxi in some places now, like Mexico city. It’s also really interesting chatting to the drivers as they usually have such fascinating stories and love to share. Using Uber also makes it easy to track your transport spending over the course of a trip instead of collecting loose receipts on every trip.

ClassPass: We make an effort to stay in shape while travelling and using ClassPass is a fun way to do that. It’s a subscription service; depending on the tier you pay for you get a certain number of classes per month at studios all around the world. You simply drop a pin for where you are staying and you can search studios near you and book a class. This means you can try a new studio in a new city and you are training with locals. It’s a really lovely experience.

Freeletics: Freeletics is a fitness app featuring high-intensity workouts you can use while travelling to burn off those pastries and pastas. The workouts are simple and often use bodyweight so you can train anywhere from a hotel gym to a park or your room. There are a number of free workouts and if you love it you can then buy into the other programs. We love it because it means we don’t have to always plan a workout, the circuits are super fast and intense so there is plenty of time left to get out and explore after you have worked up a sweat.

Megan Jerrard of Mapping Megan

Skyscanner: This app is my favorite way to stay on top of cheap flights at all times. And because it’s on your phone, you can book everything at once while you’re on the go. Features of the travel app include receiving price alerts of daily cheap deals, and for the truly spontaneous, if you enter “everywhere” instead of a specific destination, it will pull up cheap flight prices to different destinations around the world from your closest airport.

World Lens: Have you ever been on the streets of a foreign country only to realize you have no idea what all the signs mean?! Sure, the graphics on the sign may help, but there’s no way to know for sure the intended meaning. With World Lens it’s extremely simple. Open the app and use it as a magnifying glass over the text, and voila- the sign is now translated into your language of choice.

Money Journal: Sometimes when you travel it’s hard to keep up with the money flying in and out, and going back through receipts on your return can be a nightmare. This app holds our daily budget and is great for checking out the credit card statement against. Best of all my phone is always on me so I never forget to add even the slightest purchase like that 75 cent taco in Mexico or that $1 strawberry daiquiri in New Orleans.

Sofie Couwenbergh of Wonderful Wanderings

Google Maps: I think I use Google Maps more than any other app while I’m traveling. It just has all the places on there and makes it super easy to not just find places of interest, but also restaurants and cafes.

Facebook messenger: As I often travel solo, Facebook messenger makes it easy for me to connect to my loved ones at home and friends around the world if I’m feeling a bit lonely.

Tripadvisor: When I need to find a place for dinner, I often check the reviews on TripAdvisor. I know there are a bunch of review sites, but I find that TripAdvisor often has lots of reviews for a place, making it easier to gauge whether I should go there or not.

Carol Guttery of Wayfaring Views

Lightroom Mobile: Any serious photographer needs a powerful tool for editing their shots, but Lightroom does more than that. Their mobile-enabled collections provide access to your catalog from your phone or tablet, making it easy to share your high-quality shots to social media.

Maps.me: Cuba is known for their old town Havana, their old cars and their lack of a modern internet infrastructure. Maps.me is a lifesaver in places like Cuba where the internet is either expensive, slow or hard to find. Just download the country map in advance and the offline app will give you street maps, dining ideas and locations for hotels and top sights.

Kindle: Kill a long layover with a good book. Kindle’s reading app works on all mobile devices, allowing you to store as many books as you need to survive a long flight. But Kindle is also great for downloading mobile versions of travel guides, giving you an easy reference tool for the road, online or off.

Anna Faustino of Adventure in You

Trail Wallet: A great app which helps you keep track of your expenses. You can log in your daily spend, set budgets, and at the end of the month, it shows you a cool little graph to show you where you end up spending most of your money.

Currency XE: A super handy app which lets you store 10 currencies and instantly convert currencies so you know exactly how much you are spending.

Get Stoked:  A Thailand-based travel app that my partner and I developed. The idea behind it is that this app allows you to browse through things to do and instantly message companies as soon as you get to a place. We currently have playlists on various things to do in all the main hotspots around Thailand. Instead of leafing through outdated brochures or spending hours reading articles online, you can just open our app and find all our top recommendations on things to do.

We hope that you find some of the apps recommended by our travel blogger friends useful. Do you have other travel apps that you would like to share to our readers? Please leave a comment below.