The Techno Traveler
ether you’re traveling for business or vacationing with your family, it’s essential to keep tabs on flight times, rental car pickups, hotel reservations. In the past, staying organized meant printing out a hful of pages before you hit the road. Now you can use a few smartphone apps online services to keep your trip stress-free.
Once your travel details are on the books, keep all of your information organized with rldmate, which is available on the b as an app for Android, iOS, ndows one. Send reservations with major hotels, airlines, car rental brs to [email protected], then use rldmate to organize your itinerary travel confirmation numbers. You can even get turn-by-turn directions. The app also features a “personal travel assistant” that alerts you to impending flights, as well as the day’s weather at your destination.
Speaking of personal assistants, you should give Now a whirl if you already have an Android device running Android 4.1 or newer—the feature is baked into your gadget. The search giant’s digital personal assistant gives you “just in time” information drawn from services such as Calendar, Gmail, search.
Now, which is also available for iOS, can alert you when a scheduled flight is nearing—it even pulls up your digital boarding pass offers information about the flight’s status the weather at your destination. If you have reservations scheduled, Now on a G-enabled device can alert you to traffic conditions en route to the appointment, even recommending departure times for a prompt arrival. Event reservation reminders, hotel directions, details about local attractions, seamless currency conversion— Now has almost everything a die-hard traveler could want.
If your trip includes a few hours in an unfamiliar airport, download iFly Airport Guide for Android or iOS to get maps of more than 700 airports worldwide. The app also has in-terminal G navigation to help you find your gate or that all-important Starbucks outlet, along with information about terminal amenities, parking rates, -Fi availability, much more. actically the only thing missing is flight-status info, which is available in the premium version of the app.
So you’ve led at your destination, picked up your rental car, checked into your hotel. Now what? Download ere, a G-based app dedicated to helping you find local restaurants, bars, entertainment, shopping. The app, which is available for Android iOS, also offers deals from local businesses, has a social element to save share locations, to get recommendations from friends.
so try Field Trip, available for iOS Android. Sort of an amalgam of ere Now, Field Trip notifies you when you wer near a place of interest, whether it be an attraction, an interesting shop or restaurant, a piece of hyper-local history, or any other intriguing lmark. Field Trip’s database draws from a wide variety of services including Arcadia Zagat, it excels at pointing you to neighborhood highlights that you would otherwise almost certainly miss.
Finally, no trip is complete without a way to find local -Fi hotspots. Enter re’s -Fi Finder. This ione app draws on a database of more than 550,000 free paid -Fi locations in 144 countries. -Fi Finder lets you filter searches for hotspots by price (free or paid), specific Internet providers (such as AT&T or Boingo), or specific business types (such as bar or café). en the app finds a -Fi connection that meets your criteria, you can ask to be notified or have the app connect your device to the network automatically. You can also set up -Fi Finder for offline use, just in case you need to find a wireless hotspot in an otherwise dead data zone.
