When you travel you spend good amount of time researching and planning. As i went about planning my trips, i found some useful apps. Here is a compilation of some of my favourite apps:
Google Trips : This is my favourite trip manager/planner app. You don’t need to do anything just use gmail account to receive all the mails regarding your bookings whether its flight booking, Hotel booking, train booking etc . Google trip will parse all your emails ,work out your trip and share things which can be done during your stay, will plan a day by day itinerary for you. Its absolutely brilliant and very useful.
Only issue is google going through your emails which some people may not like but then all email companies parse your data. Another slightly annoying thing is you cannot manually edit your trip, everything is managed via emails but it never really created problem for me.
TripIt : It is basically a trip itinerary manager. You need to forward all your emails to a designated email id and TripIt parses those and prepares your itinerary. This is on similar lines as Google trips but main difference is that it will just show your travel itinerary and will not plan your trip. But i still use it as it generates a very nice printable itinerary.
Culture Trip : This is an app i use for researching my destinations. You just search a place in this app and it will list lots of articles on what things you can do, food options, must visit places, must try eating joints, best beers and lots more. I generally use this app to refine my trip once i have finalised few destinations.
PackPoint : This is must have app. As we plan for a trip, we may miss out on some items which we should have carried along. Just enter your destination and dates, this app will bring up a list of items which you should carry along. As you start packing you can simply start ticking those items in the list. List of items is very exhaustive and you generally don’t need to go beyond those.
HappyCow : If you are Vegetarian or Vegan then this app will be helpful. It brings up the list of restaurants, eating joints providing Veg. food. I am a Vegetarian [or semi Vegetarian;) ] and so far google search has worked well for me but in last trip i checked out this app and it did provide some good options.
Other than all these apps, i heavily rely on tripadvisor forums for planning and its the best place to get your queries answered.
If you know any more useful apps, please add in comments.