Thank God we live in the 21th century, where the entire world is practically smushed into the size of my iPhone 6. Honestly, I have to give some recognition to the travelers who relied on understanding broken English, paper maps, and pure luck to navigate through foreign countries. Of course, it’s always a good idea to have a paper map with you, and data in a foreign country could be quite costly, but a couple of travel apps definitely have helped me out of sticky situations. So, here are my favorite travel apps for navigation, finding accommodation, journaling, and even photo editing.

I just realized that I didn’t blog about the “Find Friends App.” Well thats because I didn’t use it while traveling, but I do use it now to find my friends when we’ve separated (which is still handy if you’re traveling with friends and fear ya’ll might separate). 

Transportation

Whether I’m going by air or by land, it is pretty vital that I have a travel app of the mode of transportation. For example, I used Turkish Airlines for my previous trip, so I downloaded their app. It allowed me to check-in, check on departure times, pick my seat, and keep up with the status of my plane. Another great travel app I was able to use was RailPlanner. Though it is intended for people using InterRail or EuRail, it helped me plan my trains. Note: only trains that are associated with EuRail and InterRail are on the app, which is a majority of the ones you’re probably going to use anyways. And finally, Google Maps is always going to be the best app for getting from point A to point B the fastest and easiest way possible. While these apps are super useful when traversing through major cities and some minor cities, it is definitely limited if you plan on going to small towns or locations without wifi. Travel tip: I always look for possible routes at different times whenever I have access to wifi. Then, I’ll screenshot it, as well as a map of the place in case I still somehow get lost.

Photography

I’m praising the camera gods for building a fully functional and amazing camera in my phone. Camera phones are great for pretty much anything and everything. I hate hauling around a large DSLR and even my tiny instant camera is cumbersome to carry. So, I usually stick with my camera phone for all of my pictures. For its [small] limitations, that’s why we have camera apps. I post edit all of my photos using VSCOcam. It’s free, has a great choice of filters, and lets you mess around with things that can really enhance your picture like: highlights, shadows, iso’s, saturation, fade/grain, tint, and temperature. All around, it’s my go-to photo editing app.

Journaling

While it might seem awkward to journal using your phone, there are many benefits to starting. For one, you can journal in real time at almost any location. This means that you can upload and edit pictures while you’re there. You can then quickly write a short journal entry, so that the entry is as authentic as possible. Bonjournal has a location feature, so the location of where ever you’re journaling will be automatically updated. MydistriKt is also a great app, that I was recently shown. It allows you to upload pictures and browse through distriKts other people have uploaded. Essentially, it’s a great app to see what either the locals or other tourist are doing. You can upload pictures, videos, journal entries, or entire albums. You can even find recommendations for some places, along with pictures. I like to think of it as the instagram of traveling. If you’re traveling anywhere, I highly recommend downloading the app and checking out the distrikts in the area.

Accommodation

This purely depends on where you plan on finding accommodations. Since I’m pretty much up for any type of housing I had HostelWorld, Courchsurfing, and AirBnB apps on my phone and iPad. This was super helpful, as sometimes you may find yourself homeless and need to find something cheap quickly. Its also great because if you use Couchsurfing or AirBnB, you can use the app to talk to your host, instead of having to find a computer to do so. Hostelworld allows you to save receipts to your passbook and it’ll give you both the written directions and a map on how to get to your hostel (since many are often hidden and signless).

These are just a couple of my favorite travel apps that I used while backpacking through Europe. While the choice of apps may differ from trip to trip, the overall idea is that the best apps are the ones that I can make use of with shoddy wifi and provide enough guidance to make it worth the download. Before I go on a trip, I’ll delete a lot of apps I won’t be using regularly while abroad (like games and some photo editing apps). It’ll give me more space for photos and my traveling apps of preference.