How Your Phone Can Be the Ultimate Vacation Guide

Booking the perfect vacation is easier than ever now that so many websites and apps exist to help you find the best deals and most stellar attractions. Downloading the right apps will help you plan your trip, follow your itinerary, and find great things to do while you're on vacation.

SkyScanner
The first step in taking the ultimate vacation is booking the right flight. That's where SkyScanner comes in. SkyScanner's free app helps you find the best flight, be it by price, location, or date. Booking is simple, and so is sharing the flight details.

FlightTrack
Keeping track of trips can get hectic if you've got to change flights or share and coordinate your itinerary with multiple people. FlightTrack makes it simple to follow all your flight details via your phone. This handy app color codes your flights, notifies you of delays, and gives you a simple way to share the itinerary with whoever needs to know.

Hotel Tonight
While waiting until the last minute to book a hotel isn't ideal, unfortunate things happen, and if you find yourself in need of a good room very quickly, Hotel Tonight is the perfect app for you. It's free to download, and gives you a secure way to book last-minute hotel rooms at the best price. While it isn't available in every city in the US yet, it does boast a long list of popular vacation destinations.

TripIt
TripIt is the app for keeping all your travel plans in one place. The free app gives you a clean layout of your daily itinerary, from your flight times to your car rental to your dinner plans. It offers information like your flight number and addresses of places you want to go all in an easy list form, so you can view everything from one screen. All you have to do is forward your confirmation emails to TripIt and the app does the rest of the organization work for you.

Gogobot
Once you've flown to your destination and are settled into your hotel, it's time to find things to do. The Gogobot app will help you fill your vacation days with awesome activities. Gogobot helps you find things to do wherever you are, with lots of different search parameters. Plus, once you've signed up, it makes recommendations based on your preferences. This is an app you'll use even once you get home again to find cool new things to do.

Urbanspoon
When you're hungry, Urbanspoon will help you find a great restaurant. You can filter your search based on location, type of cuisine, price range, or time of meal (e.g. breakfast, lunch, dinner). It has a handy "Nearby" button which shows you lots of options right near where you are at the moment, which is great in an unfamiliar city. You can also read reviews and create a dining timeline of all the places you've eaten.

TouristEye
Whether you need help planning your next trip or need to find something fun to do while you're in a new city, TouristEye can help. With the option to create a wish list, you can keep track of ideas for future vacations. The app also recommends cool spots to check out based on where you are during your vacation. The app features maps that are accessible offline, which will save you on roaming fees, or you can check out a good data plan from carriers like T-Mobile with no roaming fees.

Travel Guides by Stay.com
When you're looking for stuff to do, it's easy to tap on your phone's GPS app and search for things to eat or places to see. But after days of vacationing, that method can be pretty rough on your data plan. Stay.com's travel guides are offline maps, great because they still tell you where you want to go and how to get there without giving you a gigantic phone bill. From offline maps to flight trackers, these apps guide any kind of traveler to a highly customized vacation without any stress. Manage everything from your itinerary to your meals, and take advantage of the best your destination has to offer.

About the Author: Abigail Clark is an up-and-coming freelance writer. She graduated from The University of South Florida with a bachelors in marketing, minoring in journalism. When she isn’t up to her neck in coupons she is enjoying the outdoors fishing. She loves doing reviews for technology, home products and beauty products. If you would like her to do a review for you look her up on twitter @downtownabby17.

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MissPlitty: A great travel expense mobile app

There is one thing about travel that I am sure a lot of us hate and that is tracking and settling the travel expenses. Either we designate one guinea pig in the group to handle all the headache or spend prime time in keeping track of receipts or excel sheets. But, if you happen to be an Android phone user like me, then you have a brilliant travel expense solution in a mobile app called ‘MissPlitty’.



This free mobile app available on the Android market is the near perfect answer to all our travel expense tracking and settlement worries. This is a simple app that helps you in sharing expenses among participants of events like trips, holidays, parties and so on. And all these expenses can be tracked in any currency. To give you a quick example…As soon as you open your app, you get your events page. Here, you enter your event title and the desired currency. Then, you can add the participants in your event. Either you can pull the participant details from your phone contacts or add them as a new entry. Then, as you start making expenses on your trip, you can add the expense details, the person who paid the bill and then select the participants of this bill from the pre-defined list.



You keep doing this during the course of your trip. Each entry takes no more than 30 seconds and can be entered absolutely anywhere. At the end of your trip, you can ask the app to calculate and it will show numbers in red and green against each participant. The red against the participants means that they owe money to someone in the group, while the green means that they have paid in excess and will get a refund.



To make the accounting simpler, the app has a ‘Suggestions’ feature that allows the user to see who pays whom and how much. And finally, the entire expense and suggestions report can be shared via email and/or Bluetooth and/or just the suggestion summary can be shared as a text message (SMS). The mobile app is so helpful that all my recent trip expenses have been settled before the group split ways at the end of the trip. This is a fantastic travel app if you are a Android phone user. I am sure you will agree with my sentiments on your every first trip using this app. But, like all apps, even MissPlitty has some areas for improvement. One of the areas where I would like some richer functionality is the provision of splitting one bill amongst multiple participants. Right now, it allows only one participant per expense. The other requirement is to be able to simultaneously edit and share the app with all the participants. Again, these are only good-to-have features and the app as it stands today is a great one considering that it is a free app. Thank you Fabio Maffioletti for developing this seriously helpful travel app for Android.

P.S. Settle Up is another similar free mobile app that is available across iPhone, iPad and Android. You can give that a try too.

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