5 Favorite Apps & Websites for Travel

There are literally thousands of websites out there that make travel easier or cheaper. These are the five that I find most useful and couldn’t live without. Their benefits make travel simpler and some can also be used in everyday life.

TripIt lets you email your itineraries to a dropbox and it is automatically imported into your account. You can then access all of your travel information anytime anywhere. Unlike some apps in this case the app and website are equally user friendly. By using TripIt I never have to worry about accidentally deleting an email or losing a print out. You can also access the data from the app when you are offline as long as you’ve updated it when you had internet access – this is great particularly when traveling abroad.

FlightAware is an extremely simple website but lets you quickly and easily locate any flight and find out what the status is. The alternative being to head to your airline’s website which are rarely well organized or easy to navigate. This also allows to search by route rather than specific flight number.

Using Miles is an incredible service that lets you store all of your frequent traveler programs in a single account. Beyond just saving time from needing to look up your frequent flier number the website also pulls in your current balances and lets you know when miles are expiring. You can also use the search function to search for flights that are eligible for your frequent flier miles rather than searching each individual website. In addition to airline points they have also added hotel chains, car rentals and now added regular retail stores like Starbucks so you can track reward programs for all sorts of companies in a single account.

WhatsApp is a service that lets you text message from anywhere in the world via your web connection rather than through your wireless carrier. Being able to chat live with this mobile app saves you a ton of money when you are texting from abroad or texting someone who has an international phone number.

The Kindle App may not be a traveler’s first thought for their favorite travel app but it’s toward the top of my list. The fact that I can buy a book with a single click is great, but the real feature that I also love is the ability for the app to sync across devices. I can read a book on my iPad but also open the app on my Android phone and pick up where I left off when I am riding the subway and don’t want to pull out my iPad as I fight for my balance.