As you get ready to embark on your own summer vacation, here’s a quick list of smartphone apps that can help you get organized, find great deals, and save you money along the way.
1.Waze – Whether your trip involves a lot of road travel, or you just want to find a faster way to get to places in your own city, consider Waze. It uses social media input to give real-time updates on traffic situations. For example, if there’s a game downtown in the city you’re visiting, as you’re trying to navigate that same area to get to a restaurant, Waze will let you know where the jams are so you can avoid the tangle, the time and the fuel wasted waiting for game-goers.
2. GasBuddy – GasBuddy is another app that takes advantage of the constant updates and interaction of crowdsourcing. People keep an eye out for low prices and input those prices into GasBuddy. Users can quickly and easily search for gas stations nearby and compare prices to ensure the best deal in their area.
3. TripIt – This is a great tool to use in partnership with your travel agent! Reservations, tickets, events, meetings, personal gathering with friends or family — you can basically have all the important details of your trip at your fingertips, all in one convenient place.
All those confirmation emails that you get from hotels, airlines, car rental services and the like? The ones you frantically search your inbox for the night before you leave on a vacation? You can simply send all these emails along to plans@tripit.com, which will then magically generate a digital itinerary that you can refer to on your mobile device. It also provides weather info and maps of your destinations. You can add multiple trips to TripIt if you’re a frequent traveler, or just use it for a single vacation. All the services described above are free, or you can upgrade to a paid version for even more cushy service and alerts.
4. Around Me — Ever find yourself in an unfamiliar city, and you just want a decent cup of coffee or a place to buy an extra toothbrush? This application tells you all the points of interest that are located near you. It detects your current location and lets you select from categories like bars, cafés, hospitals, pharmacies, and hotels to filter through the results.
5. Road Trippers — This is a fun travel tool made for the iPhone as an app, but that is also available via the internet so you can use it with Android and other smartphone platforms. Here’s how it works: you type in your starting and destination points and it tells you distance, time and estimated gas costs. This is great for day trips — think of a great tour of Napa while staying in San Francisco. While the distance-finding feature in itself isn’t necessarily groundbreaking, RoadTrippers goes one better and tells you about all of the attractions worth seeing along the way, from the obvious to the wonderfully ridiculous.
There are tons of apps to explore, of course, and this is just a glimpse — but these should add some fun and help you plan and save a few dollars. Once we’ve worked together to plan your awesome summer vacation, give these apps a try and let me know how it goes!
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