What makes a smartphone so great is that there are all sorts of different applications available to make your life so much easier. If you are having a hard time navigating a new city, GPS apps abound. If you can’t understand a language, translation apps are available. If there isn’t an app for one of your needs yet, give it time, and someone will create it.
Here are 5 apps for your smartphone that will help you make sure that your trips go perfectly:
Trip Splitter takes care of who owes what when handling expenses on a trip or dinner. It works great even for large parties because you can put in as many participants as you want. You can also email participants a reminder after the trip is over if you don’t want to take care of everything right away. This is great for travelling in a large group that isn’t necessarily financially linked or for certain business situations.
This is a travel app that has equal use at home, allowing you to split up a shared bar tab or simply let you figure out how much everyone owes for pizza. If you find yourself a social person, this app is definitely worth downloading.
If you are travelling, then a Virtual Private Network (VPN) can be the savior to your privacy and data. If you are travelling, you are likely using many public networks, which can be incredibly risky to use since hackers can intercept sent data (including private communications and financial information) over unprotected networks and then use it against you.
What a VPN will do is connect your computer through an encrypted “tunnel” of sorts to an offsite server that no one can infiltrate, and this server will handle your requests and send you whatever information you want just like normal. Using this server also has the benefit of masking your IP Address and location data, which means you can get around regional restrictions and even possibly allow you to take advantage of regional pricing for airline tickets.
There are several options to choose from, but ExpressVPN is a great choice in particular due to its compatabilty with smartphones on any operating system.
If you are travelling to a major city, you should check out Citymapper. It is one of the most popular and highest-quality apps for figuring out transit (in almost any form) in major cities, particularly in the United States, which can be harder to navigate than many European cities. Some of the things that are especially useful are real-time updating of departure times, bike routes, and alerts if there is a disruption on a route so you can adjust accordingly.
If you put in a location within a city, this app will find a way for you to get there. In fact, it will probably find multiple ways for you to get there. When you’re in a new place, there will be nothing you are more thankful for.
If you are going to a different country that doesn’t speak English (which is most of them), you want this application on your phone. While not perfect, Google Translate is improving constantly. It has most every language you will need and is fast enough to beat out most other translation devices available and certainly faster than lugging around a two-way dictionary for each language you might need.
This one might be considered a little extreme for some, but jet lag is awful and can ruin a day or two of a perfectly good vacation. If you don’t want this to happen, then Entrain is the app you need both before and during your trip.
It provides you with a schedule and data for when you should seek light in order to help your body adjust to the new time zone as quickly as possible. You can use this data to adjust your circadian clock and keep up your energy after your flight. With lots of options at the press of a thumb, you won’t need to figure out anything else to get your sleep cycle in check.
Thank you for reading. Please note that any applications listed here can be found on both iTunes and Google Play. I hope that you have found something here that you are looking for so that you may travel with improved safety and convenience.
