From booking airline tickets to helping you pack the perfect suitcase, your mobile phone will be the essential companion for your next trip.
There are many travel planning apps. So many that they even have their own category in the big app stores. If you're a hardcore traveler, you probably already have your favorites downloaded to your mobile – and compiled in the same folder – but if you're one of those who still trusts paper travel guides and takes notes in a notebook, take a look at the following list and become a globetrotter 2.0.
Travel itinerary apps – don’t get lost
Roadtrippers
Road trips are always the most difficult trips to plan. Not only do you need to know the right route – something navigation apps do perfectly –, but you also need to know where to stop on the way, whether it's refuelling or just admiring an off the road attraction.
Roadtrippers does exactly that: just enter your origin and destination and it provides you with the complete itinerary and several suggestions of places to visit, sleep – including camping sites – and eat. The road is always full of surprises, but with this app discovering them is a little easier.
TripIt
Organizing a trip usually means receiving several confirmation emails – flights, hotels, restaurants – which makes all the important information scattered. Putting it together in one place and displaying it in a friendly way is what makes TripIt one of the classic travel planning apps.
Just send those confirmation emails to the app and in a moment it traces a complete itinerary that tells you when to catch the plane, where your hotel is or even what time you have a table at the restaurant. It also syncs with your calendar, so you don't miss an event.
Available on: Mac, iOS and Android
AirHopping
Taking a trip without having a clear destination? Sounds like a planner's nightmare. Unless you use AirHopping. This app is for those adventurers who want to get to know as many places as possible at the most affordable price – isn't that what we all want?
Simply enter the city of origin, a range of dates and the number of destinations you want to visit (from two to four). The app automatically suggests those cheaper combinations, such as Copenhagen-Budapest-Berlin or New York-Atlanta-Washington. All bookings and confirmations are made from within the app itself, so all you have to do is manage your luggage.
Packing Pro
No matter if traveling is your thing, you've probably arrived at the hotel more than once and realized that you'd forgotten something. Never again with this app.
In addition to including exhaustive lists of essentials for all types of travelers, it also allows you to make personalized lists based on factors as relevant as the weather at destination, trip duration or food preferences. Its intuitive interface makes it much more convenient than a paper list, although the downside is that there is no free version.
Available on: iOS
Travel weather apps – pack an accurate suitcase
WeatherBug
If you're a weather nerd and it’s not enough for you to simply know if your destination will be sunny or rainy, WeatherBug is for you. In fact, our recommendation is that it should be a must on your mobile, whether you travel or not.
Although its interface is clear, the information it can provide is very extensive, from the detection of lightning in real time to the concentration of environmental pollen, including all the classics such as temperature, precipitation or atmospheric pressure. There won't be a situation that catches you off guard.
Available on: Windows, Mac, iOS and Android
The Weather Channel
The mobile version of one of the most visited time sites – and, according to the ForecastAdvisor comparator, the one that is usually more accurate. It is direct, user-friendly and its ‘Now’ section gives the most useful information for day-to-day use.
As an extra, in addition to the two-week predictions, you can also predict the risk of flu and alert when it is high in the area in which you are.
Have you already downloaded any of these travel planning apps? Whatever your favorite, there's something you should never forget to take with you when you travel, and it's a travel pillow: planning is useless if you're tired!
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