Travel apps are making travel easier and more enjoyable. If you are a mobile Internet user, you no longer need to consult guidebooks or choose hotels and restaurants at random in the hope that they will be worth visiting. Instead, you can rely on travel apps to improve your travel experiences. Here are five travel apps that should help you to have a good trip.

TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor’s apps for mobile phones and tablets enable you to read reviews of hotels, restaurants, vacation rentals and airlines in many cities, towns and other localities worldwide. Businesses in each city are also ranked according to their overall ratings from reviews, so you can look for the best restaurants and avoid booking the lowest-ranked hotels.

All of the ratings and reviews on TripAdvisor have been made by travelers, who, just like you, have found the best and worst places to stay and eat by trial and error. By using the TripAdvisor app, you can benefit from their collective wisdom and gain a firmer basis for your travel decisions than just general information in a guidebook.

Trippy

As on TripAdvisor, people share their experiences of travel with others on Trippy. However, Trippy is more personal than TripAdvisor because it allows individual travelers to share their travel plans, experiences and wishes with their friends. Users may consider Trippy to be a more trustworthy source of travel-related information because the recommendations are provided by their friends (or friends of friends).

One nice aspect of Trippy’s mobile app is that you can use it to share your travel photographs with your friends. This means that your friends can see the places you are visiting while you are there.

Airbnb

Wherever you happen to be in the world, Airbnb’s mobile app enables you to find, reserve, and pay for a place to stay from your mobile phone. If you are looking for a place to stay at short notice, it enables you to search for rooms, apartments or other properties within a particular area that are available the same day. Once you have found a place to stay, the app will also give you directions to your bed for the night.

Airbnb’s app is particularly useful if you find yourself in an unfamiliar city with nowhere to stay the night.

Couchsurfing

Both Airbnb and Couchsurfing list accommodations offered by hosts from all over the world but the main difference between the two websites is that accommodations posted on Couchsurfing are absolutely free of charge, while those offered on Airbnb have to be paid for. Couchsurfing’s aim is to promote trust and friendship amongst people worldwide and the accommodations offered are usually a couch or a spare room in the host’s home.

Couchsurfing’s mobile app enables you to search for offers of a couch or room from your mobile phone. You can also browse through descriptions of the accommodations offered and check out references from people who have stayed there in the past. The app allows you to contact hosts and arrange accommodations while you are on the move.

Hotel Tonight

If you are looking for a hotel room for tonight, you can use Hotel Tonight’s app to book a room at a reduced rate. On Hotel Tonight, quality hotels offer their unsold rooms at very reasonable prices, creating a win-win situation for both the hotels and travelers.

At present, Hotel Tonight only covers a range of cities in the USA, Canada and the United Kingdom, as well as Dublin in Ireland and Amsterdam in the Netherlands. However, the number of cities covered is likely to broaden in future as Hotel Tonight is expanding its business.

Travel apps are growing in popularity as people increasingly use their smartphones or tablet PCs while they are traveling. Travel apps are particularly useful if you find yourself in an unfamiliar location with nowhere to stay the night. They can also help you to share photographs with your friends, find a great place to have a coffee, book a flight for the next leg of your journey, and much more.

Featured images:

•  License: Creative Commons image source

Laura is an avid traveller and recommends everyone who is planning on travelling abroad to compare mobile phones and find one that not only is suitable for travel apps but one that will also work whilst abroad.