A list of useful tools (digital, electronic, offline, etc.) for your next travel.
- Wikitravel - completely crowd-sourced travel guide. Opinions of thousands of writers makes each travel guide really interesting, holistic and not unnecessarily romanticised like travel books. Gives practical advices.
- Moon Guides - like Lonely Planet, but better. Simple to get started about a place - does not overload you with a lot of information. Very practical.
- Rough Guides - like Lonely Planet, but better. Very detailed about the places they cover. Also, they come with pre-built itineraries about important places to cover that can help you plan your own itinerary. Itineraries can also be found on their websites for free. It's a handy resource while traveling to find more details about a place.
- Tripadvisor - for reviews of restaurants, hotels, BnBs, shops, experiences. Also, a really good forum to ask questions from others people to plan your next trip. Most probably your questions have already been asked which means that the answers you are looking for are just a Google search away.
- Google Trips - detects your next travel from Gmail to suggest itineraries within a city. It can also auto-magically create day trips suggesting where to start and what route to take for covering places you want to see. Also syncs with Google Maps so places you bookmark here are shown on Google Maps.
- Airbnb Experiences - for finding and booking activities and experiences.
- Nomad List - for digital nomads to find their next destination to travel or live and work. Also, good for travellers looking to find interesting facts about their next destination, either for planning or just for fun.
- Hopper - Hopper can monitor flight rates, predict when is the best time to buy to get you most savings.
- Kayak - flight aggregator, helps you find cheap flights at a given point of time. You can also find car rentals and accommodation, although there could be better platforms for that.
- Sky Scanner - another good flight aggregator, helps you find cheap flights. They have a cool feature using which you can find the cheapest flights to any destination on any given date from your city - can be real handy for the adventurous kinds to just hop on a flight to a random destination.
- Flix Bus - bus service company for Europe. Really Cheap buses, really good coverage and service.
- Omio - formely Go Euro, an aggregator of flights, trains, buses, ride sharing, carrentals for Europe. Great platform to plan most of your transport in Europe. It also aggregates from Flix Bus, other bus services, most major airlines, etc.
Cab hailing services:
Car rental services with global coverage:
- Airbnb - find some of the best stay experiences with locals. A lot of hotels / businesses have also started listing themselves here.
- Booking.com - more complete than Airbnb, you can find BnBs, small hotels big hotels, hostels, pretty much everything. Their catalogue is huge. Often (in my experience), they have been the cheapest. Also, good tools to filter search and communicate the host / hotel.
- Hostel World - lists just hostels. In that, the hostels here can be cheaper than Booking. Good filter and search tools to find the right hostel for your needs.
- Google Maps - the de-facto of navigation. It's amazing how much Google Maps has covered. Always good to check your next destination before you start to find most accurate directions.
- Waze - although Google Maps should mostly work everwhere, sometimes the features could be different in different countries. For example, the driving navigation feature didn't work me when I was in Morocco. In situations like such, Waze is a great alternative. Also, additional features like speed trap, gas stations, restaurants, tourist information centers, etc. an come in handy.
- City Mapper - transport app (bus, subway routes and timings) for Europe. Works only in a few cities though but it is used a lot more than Google Maps by the locals.
- Transit - transit App, simplifying the commute in more than 175 cities worldwide.
Useful software and hardware
- GoPro Hero -
- Dropbox, Google Drive - for making important documents for your travel available offline on your phone. Comes in real handy for managing bookings and keeping Wikitravel pages offline.
- Google Photos - auto-backup your photos/videos on your phone so that you don't loose them and don't run out of storage quickly.
- Google Translate - Best friend for conversing in another foreign language. The camera and voice features make it really easy. Also possible to make translations available offline.
- Splitwise - one of the best apps to manage costs with friends.
- Duolingo - learn a few important words of the foreign language before you reach your destination.
- Spotify - your ultimate music player on the move. Very little data consumption while streaming. With the paid version, you can even make your favourite songs available offline.
- Cam Scanner - good to have to help you scan papers if the need arises.