What travel app do you love using the most? Whether it’s for planning, booking, tracking expenses, or getting around at your destination… We are headed out for two years of travel starting this fall and looking for an app that will help us organize our trip info. Hope to find something that will allow two people to share info. We’d love to hear your recommendations and why you think they’re worth using.
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I like to use TripIt. It allows me to enter all my bookings (planes, hotels, activities, etc) with lots of information. With the Pro version you get lots of travel information as well and you can track your points with several programs, look at airports maps, notifications for flights, etc.
I use it as a travel journal also because there are several ways to enter notes of different kinds and attach pictures and documents. And as we travel it provides statistics of different cities and countries we’ve seen and miles travelled.
And I have it on my phone and tablet and it is accessible also through the website.
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I use the Tripcase app. I enter my flight info and receive notifications re flight changes, gate changes at the airport, etc. I also add my hotel bookings. I find it very helpful.
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Thank you! We just found that one and are giving it a try.
I have not heard of that one. Thank you, I will go check it out.
I also have used TripIt for years and find it to be so easy to use and keep track of everything with multiple people especially if you have a trip with several reservations/bookings.
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Citymapper is a great app for getting around many big cities in Europe/North American.
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Hi @themobileretiree. My husband and I have done a few different things. On our first 3-year world adventure, when we typically only spent a few days in each place and we were together most of the time, we used TripIt. It worked well.
We’re taking a different approach this time, which has led us to use different tools to stay organized. We’re now making this nomadic lifestyle our way of life, not just traveling around, and we’re both working part-time. Sometimes we’re together; sometimes we’re not. One of the keys to our being able to live this way for the past three years is that we now typically stay in each place for a month or more. We dive more deeply into each place, and therefore have lots more information to keep organized.
We’re on Windows and Android devices. We tried using Apple devices but went back to using Windows and Androids because of the sharing tools they provide. All of our shared tools are available on both our laptops and our phones, and they may be good on Apple devices now, too.
- We use OneNote for our notes / lists / planning. We may not use our list of best small artsy towns in the US right away, but we do go back from time to time and look through our earlier notes, to inform our planning for the months ahead (We find lots of information on places when we’re researching a different place, like a list of the great little artsy towns when we’re looking into one such town.)
- Excel we use for things like financial records and other data that is nice to easily sort and filter (ie, filtering our list of National Parks to see which we haven’t been to yet, etc.)
- The best, and one we use most often, is a shared Google Calendar / email account. We use it as the record of where we’ll be staying, concerts/festivals/etc. we want to see (and whether we’ve purchased tickets yet or not), birthdays and other special dates to remember, etc. We love Google calendar, as we can see our joint items with or without our personal items. Calendar also makes it easy to see when we have a gap in our plans that needs to be addressed, such as a few days between sits with no place to stay. Or do our overnight accommodation dates match up with our flight dates.
Whatever you choose, understand that as you go you will learn things about your personal styles, the tools you chose, and new tools you hadn’t considered earlier. That’s one of the joys of long-term travel. You learn more about yourself, your travel partner, the world, and what’s possible than you could have originally imagined. Just be flexible and go with the flow. You’ll be amazed where it will take you!
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I love ‘travel spend’ for tracking expenses. It allows you to set up each trip, with a budget and the and the ability to enter expenditures. There are stats for different ways to evaluate. Ive used it for three trips, currently half way through a 3 month trip. It really enables me to be smarter and keep to my budget.
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thank you I will go check it out too!
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Thank you. We are currently using our Google Workspace account and it has a lot of great features; a shared drive, sheets (google’s excel), docs and multiple shared calendar so we (I) can see specific “layers”. Hubby WAS using evernote to jot down things while on his phone until I showed him how he can have a google doc on his phone’s home screen and use it much like evernote but it’s already shared with me because it’s in our workspace drive. Glad to hear that someone else is finding that google features are “enough”.
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A combo of Trip it and Google Workspace.
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Can anyone recommend a good app for parking? The one that shows free parking and paid parking with prices? Would be super helpful when I get around US cities
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I’ve used SpotAngels a few times to find street, lot or garage parking. In fact, I found a 3-week garage parking spot with in-and-out privileges in the CBD (central business district) of New Orleans for $7/day using SpotAngels. It’s based on a crowdsourcing model, so some cities have more info than others.
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That’s cool. I had not heard of spotangels!
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I honestly don’t know what married couples especially ones with kids did before google cal 
I’ve been using the Wanderlog app, free version.
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I’ve never heard of that app @ExploreDreamDiscover. What do you use it for?
What does that do
I use it to organize things I’m interested in doing.
Then it will show me where they are on a map. You can create list like one for restaurants. I make itineraries if I have plans for certain days. And you can make notes. You can add flight and hotel links & reservations but I don’t use that feature much. Here is a screenshot for my upcoming trip to Sicily with my cousins.
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