Photo by CC user JESHOOTS on Pixabay
It’s summer vacation season and holiday goers are increasingly turning to technology to enhance their experience. Discover hidden gems, make your activity destination without the loss of bearings, and save a packet on your hotel and other deals. Here are a few essential travel apps to keep you ahead of the game when vacationing.
Duolingo
The language app is excellent for learning simple, essential phrases to help you navigate language barriers in other countries. To maintain interest and concentration, this app requires you to complete levels, with a well-designed variation in testing format, before you progress to the next level. You gain experience points as you advance. This is great for preparing you with useful phrases before you jet off.
FlightTrack
This is a nifty flight path app with mapping, and comprehensive departure gate, arrival, delay information and more, so if you need to know when to pick someone up or plan your flight on the go, you can do it following the plane’s very route.
XE Currency
An essential money saver, XE Currency gives free, up to the minute currency conversion rates which can be saved offline. Not only that, you can access historical conversion rates as well as find information on the values of precious metals as they change. It also helps you compare provider prices to avoid being short-changed.
Skyscanner
It aggregates all the flight prices and deals from travel sites and airlines to find you the best deal. If you bookmark your searches it can help you to watch the changes in price, and it does this for flights, hotels and care hire.
Timeout
A well-known app for suggesting the best activities to do in cities form around the world, it covers everything from bars, festivals and events to monuments and attractions and one-off events and seminars in the local area. The app also lets you book your tickets for events or a table for a bite to eat, and you can even personalise an itinerary from it. If you use the ‘near me’ feature it will update its suggestions to your location.
Wolfram Sun Exposure
This app is a rare and excellent resource for the skin health conscious traveller. It offers a UV forecast, gauges the position of the sun in your location, sunrise and set times, and gives a weather forecast. More importantly, by tapping in the time of day and your skin type, the factor of any sun protection you are wearing, it calculates how long you can safely stay in the sun in its ‘time to sunburn’ feature.
Scribd
If you want to be able to read but not carry an e-reader around, Scribd offers an unlimited access facility for books, personalizing its recommendations based on what you’ve read, and for a set subscription cost is cheaper than buying individual titles. It has a customisable display, special editorial versions of books and you can access anything uploaded to the service, including academic papers and court documents.
Betway
It’s not the first entertainment idea to come to mind but casino games have risen in popularity. That is thanks to the increasing range and format you can play these games online in, also saving phone storage. Everything is available from the traditional slots and roulette to new beach-themed, movie-themed types and more. Your deposits are matched with free bonuses to get you started and keep costs down, giving you something different to do while
Splittr
An innovative cost-sharing app, this is geared especially towards travelling. It lets users chip in for the cost of a meal, accommodation and more, split between friends. You can tap in expenses as you go, noting and saving each contribution, and its support for all the world’s currencies saves you the trouble of converting yourself so you can even enter mixed currencies. It handily lets you create, send and print off reports too.
These are the apps among many that will come in handy for practical reasons as well as finding things to do, and you’ll wonder how you got by without them.