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I have, over the years, accumulated a frankly embarrassing number of travel apps. At some point in my late forties I looked at my phone and realised I had seventeen apps whose combined purpose was essentially to help me do what a decent travel agent used to do for about thirty quid. The apps are free. The travel agent was thirty quid. I am not certain this represents progress, but here we are.
What follows is not a comprehensive directory of every app that has ever claimed to be useful for travellers. It is a list of the things I actually use, assembled from years of solo travel across more countries than I can remember without a spreadsheet. I recommend none of these because someone has paid me to; I recommend them because they are what I would tell a friend to download before getting on a plane to somewhere they have never been.
If it is not on my Trip Planning Tools page, it is not something I use. That page is where I keep everything current; this article is the fuller explanation of why.
Finding the Right Flight (These Are Not the Same Thing as Booking It)
The first thing to understand about booking flights is that finding the flight and booking the flight are two separate activities, and conflating them is how you end up paying more than you needed to.
I start with Skyscanner. I want to be transparent about this: I have no affiliate arrangement with Skyscanner. I recommend it because it is genuinely the best tool I have found for comparing routes, seeing which days are cheapest, and understanding what the flight actually involves before I commit to anything. It is also free, which helps.
The thing Skyscanner does well is showing you the whole picture. You can set it to search across a full month rather than a specific date, which is useful if you have any flexibility. You can see not just prices but journey times, stopovers, and which carriers are operating the route. It is, in short, a research tool rather than a booking tool, and that is how I use it.
The VPN Trick (Works Sometimes, Not Worth Obsessing Over)
There is a reasonably well-known phenomenon where flight prices vary depending on where in the world the booking site thinks you are. The logic is simple enough: airlines price dynamically, and a flight departing from Bangkok might show a different price to someone searching from Bangkok than to someone searching from London. Using a VPN to change your apparent location occasionally surfaces a lower price.
I have tried this. It works sometimes. It does not work consistently enough to make it the first thing you do, but if you have time to spare and the price is large enough to make the effort worthwhile, it costs nothing to check. Set your VPN to the departure country first, then try a few alternatives. The difference, when it exists, is usually modest rather than transformative.
Worth noting: I do not pay for a standalone VPN service. Mine comes bundled with my antivirus software subscription, which makes it effectively free. Before you sign up for anything, check whether your existing antivirus package already includes a VPN — a surprising number do, and most people never switch it on.
Do not spend an hour on this for a short-haul fare. The arithmetic rarely justifies the time.
Where I Actually Book
Once I know the route and the approximate price from Skyscanner, I book through one of three platforms depending on the circumstances: Trip.com, Expedia, or Booking.com.
Trip.com has become my default, partly because it handles Asian carriers and routes particularly well, and partly because the platform is genuinely well-designed for the kind of multi-stop travel I tend to do. Expedia is useful for packaging flights with accommodation when that makes financial sense. Booking.com, despite being better known for hotels, has a flight search that is worth checking when prices elsewhere look stubborn.
Cross-referencing two or three of these against the Skyscanner figure takes about four minutes and occasionally saves a meaningful amount of money. At the very least, it tells you when the price you found first is actually a fair one.
If You Want Business Class, or the Cheapest Possible Fare
Going.com: Business Class for Considerably Less
I have a dedicated post on how Going.com works and whether it is worth it, and I will not repeat the whole thing here, but the short version is this: for roughly $200 a year, Going.com’s premium subscription sends you alerts when business class fares drop to what they describe as mistake price territory. On a long-haul flight, a single upgrade of this kind can save you more than the annual subscription costs several times over.
The significant caveat, which I want to be honest about, is that the vast majority of the deals are based on flights departing from the United States. If you are based in the UK, as I am, the direct-from-London deals are rarer. What does work, if you are flexible, is routing via a US connection; deals departing from London to a US city and onward to Asia, for instance, do appear. For my American readers, this is close to a no-brainer if you fly long-haul even once a year.
Going.com also comes with complimentary lounge access on qualifying fares, which is either a useful bonus or the thing that tips the decision, depending on how you feel about airport lounges. I feel about airport lounges the way most people feel about a good library: they are civilised, quiet, and make the whole business of travel more bearable.
Kiwi.com: The Cheapest Fare, No Questions Asked
If business class is not the objective and the cheapest possible fare is, Kiwi.com is the place to look. The platform is built around the idea that the cheapest way to get from A to B often involves going via C and D and waiting in an airport for several hours in between.
This is not for everyone. If a twelve-hour layover in an unfamiliar city sounds like a nightmare rather than an adventure, Kiwi.com is not your tool. But if you are genuinely flexible about your time, comfortable navigating large airports, and principally concerned with spending as little as possible on the flight itself, it consistently finds options that the mainstream booking platforms miss.
I would suggest it particularly for budget-conscious travellers who are doing a longer trip through multiple countries and are happy to treat a long layover as an informal bonus destination. Some people genuinely enjoy this. I find it more appealing in theory than in practice, but I am the man who spent four hours in Singapore airport eating Chicken Rice, so perhaps I am not the best judge.
Translation: What Actually Works
I used Google Translate almost exclusively for years. It is fast, it works offline if you download the relevant language packs, and for single words or short phrases it is perfectly reliable. If you want to know what something on a menu says, or you need to show a taxi driver an address in a local script, Google Translate handles this without drama.
The problem emerges when the text is longer or the sentence structure is more complex. Thai, Japanese, and Mandarin in particular can produce translations from Google Translate that are technically composed of words but are not quite sentences; you can often get the gist, but the gist is not always enough. I have, on more than one occasion, handed a phone to someone in a restaurant displaying a Google Translate output, watched their expression shift from polite to puzzled, and realised that whatever I had intended to communicate had not survived the journey.
I now use Gemini and ChatGPT for anything requiring a longer translation or a more nuanced phrasing. Both are free. Both handle complex sentences considerably better than Google Translate. The simplest workflow is to paste the text or type what you want to say and ask the app to translate it naturally for a native speaker; the result is almost always more usable than a direct translation. This sounds more complicated than it is; in practice, it takes about thirty seconds more than Google Translate and produces a noticeably better result.
Download all three. Use Google Translate for the quick jobs. Use Gemini or ChatGPT when what you need to say is more than four words long.
Planning the Trip Itself
My Trip Planning Tools page is where I keep a full list of what I use at every stage of a trip. Rather than repeat the entire thing here, I will pull out the ones that get used most often and explain why they are worth having on the phone before you leave.
Rome2Rio: Finding Routes You Did Not Know Existed
Rome2Rio shows you every possible way to get between two places, including options that no individual booking platform would surface. It covers planes, trains, buses, ferries, and combinations of all of the above. When you are trying to work out how to get from a rural area of Thailand to a particular island, or whether there is a bus between two cities that most people fly between, Rome2Rio will find it.
It is a research tool rather than a booking platform. The prices it shows are indicative rather than live. But for understanding the geography of a journey before you commit to anything, it is genuinely invaluable.
CityMapper: Urban Navigation Done Properly
Google Maps is fine for most things. CityMapper is better than fine for navigating public transport in large cities. It integrates live data, knows which exit to use at tube stations, and presents connection information in a format that makes it possible to understand quickly rather than stare at for thirty seconds trying to work out which way you are facing.
It covers most major cities in Asia and Europe. For anyone spending time in Singapore, Tokyo, Bangkok, Hong Kong, or similar urban environments with complex transit networks, it is worth downloading before you arrive.
TripIt: Keeping Everything in One Place
TripIt does one thing: it aggregates your travel documents into a single organised itinerary. Forward your confirmation emails to its address and it builds a timeline automatically. Flights, hotels, car hire, restaurant reservations; everything in sequence, accessible offline.
For a multi-destination trip with several moving parts, having this is considerably less stressful than scrolling through an inbox trying to find the confirmation that matters. It is free at the basic level. The paid version adds real-time flight alerts, which you may or may not find worth the additional cost.
Hopper: For When You Are Not Sure Whether to Book Now
Hopper watches flight and hotel prices and tells you whether it predicts the price will rise or fall. It is imperfect; no price prediction tool can account for everything. But for someone who is flexible on dates and wants a reasonably informed view of whether waiting another week is likely to save money or cost it, Hopper is useful.
It is most valuable in the research phase, before you have committed to specific dates. Once you know exactly when you are travelling, the price has largely been set by circumstances.
Maps.Me: Offline Maps That Actually Work
Download the map of wherever you are going before you board the plane. Maps.Me operates entirely offline, which makes it indispensable in places where data connectivity is expensive or unreliable. It covers most of the world in reasonable detail, including walking paths and points of interest that Google Maps occasionally misses in less-visited areas.
It is the app I use when I am somewhere quiet and do not want to chew through data finding out where the nearest anything is.
XE: Currency Conversion Without Theatre
XE is the currency conversion app. It has live rates, a clean interface, and works without fuss. It is the thing you open when the person at the market is telling you a price in baht and you want to know, without making it obvious, whether that is reasonable. I have used it in forty-something countries and it has never required me to do anything more complicated than typing in a number.
Glympse: For People Who Should Know Where You Are
Glympse lets you share your live location with someone for a set period of time. You send a link, they see where you are on a map in real time, and after the time you have set the sharing automatically stops.
As a solo traveller, this is the app I use when I am doing something where it seems sensible for someone at home to be able to see where I am. It requires nothing from the recipient beyond a web browser. No account, no download, no fuss. It is a simple solution to a simple safety question and it does exactly what it claims.
If You Are Starting From Scratch: The Trip.com AI Travel Planner
For anyone planning a trip to somewhere they have not been before, or arranging an itinerary involving several countries and multiple stops, I recommend starting with the Trip.com AI Travel Planner. I have a page which explains what it does and how to use it, and it is worth a few minutes of your time before you start.
The short version: it is free, it is powered by Trip.com’s data, and it produces detailed itineraries for multi-stop trips that would take a significant amount of time to assemble manually. You tell it where you want to go, roughly how long you have, and what kind of trip you are looking for, and it gives you a structured plan including accommodation suggestions, how to get between places, and how long to allow at each stop.
It is particularly good for first-time visitors to a destination and for trips involving more than two or three countries. For experienced travellers with strong preferences about how they organise a journey, it is a useful starting point that you will inevitably adjust. For anyone who finds the blank page of trip planning mildly overwhelming, it removes the blank page entirely.
The planner is free to use, and the Trip.com platform connects it directly to real bookings once you have a plan you are happy with, which makes the transition from planning to booking reasonably seamless.
Staying Connected: The eSIM Question
Sorting out a local SIM used to involve a queue at an airport shop, a form with more fields than seemed strictly necessary, and a SIM card that occasionally required a pin the shop assistant wrote on a piece of paper that you subsequently lost. The eSIM has, largely, replaced all of this.
I use Airalo. You buy a data plan through the app before you travel, it installs directly to your phone without any physical card, and you arrive at your destination already connected. The plans cover individual countries, regional bundles across multiple countries, and global options if your travel is more scattered.
The prices are competitive with local SIMs in most markets, the coverage is generally solid, and the whole process takes about three minutes from start to finish. If your phone supports eSIM, which most phones made in the last four or five years do, this is the most practical solution I have found to staying connected abroad without paying whatever your home carrier considers a reasonable roaming rate, which is invariably not.
For more detail on the connectivity options, including a comparison of eSIM providers and physical SIM approaches, the guide to staying connected abroad without paying roaming charges covers this in full.
A Final Note on App Overload
The apps I have listed here are the ones that genuinely get used. I am aware that the internet will happily provide you with a list of forty-seven travel apps, each described as essential, and that downloading forty-seven apps before a trip is both unnecessary and the kind of thing that will make your phone unusable.
Start with the connectivity (Airalo, offline maps, Google Translate) because those are the three things you will want on day one before you have access to decent wifi. Add the navigation and planning apps as you need them. The AI translation improvement is worth setting up before you go somewhere where the language gap is significant; it takes about two minutes to install either Gemini or ChatGPT if you do not already have them.
The flight booking workflow, Going.com and Kiwi.com included, is most useful in the planning phase rather than the travel phase. Know what you want, check the prices, book the thing, and then concentrate on everything else.
The full list of what I use, kept current, is on the Trip Planning Tools page. Everything on that page is something I would recommend to someone I actually like. That is the entire selection criterion, and I do not intend to change it.
Staying online is really the foundation everything else on this list depends on, and I go into that properly in my guide to staying connected abroad without paying roaming charges, along with my own honest Airalo eSIM review. If you are leaning toward working while you travel rather than just holidaying, most of this kit becomes considerably more important, which I cover in what solo travel has taught me about working remotely over 50.
A note on how I write: Every trip starts with a journal, filled in wherever I happen to be; on a bus, plane, train, or in a backstreet cafe that has clearly seen better days. It’s not tidy, and it’s not always legible even to me. When I get the time, I use AI to help turn those notes into something readable, organising drafts and occasionally rescuing a sentence that has wandered off without me. The experiences, the perspective, the humour and every editorial decision remain entirely mine. As for the photos, I’m not remotely fond of having my picture taken, family portraits included, so I also use AI to help visualise the places and moments I write about.
