Another Travel Apps Post

There are a dozen other places where you can get a list of travel apps – check them out, if you must. Me, I find travel apps to be of little use, and even a bit dangerous. Beware -- if you’re choosing to run your trip off of a mobile device, you should consider the following:

1. Your battery may run out at an inconvenient time
2. You may not have cell coverage when you most need it
3. Digital map information can be very misleading
4. Books are cooler

Example for #4: you’re on the back porch at Les Crayeres, sipping a 2001 Veuve Rose, and game planning for the next day.  Do you want to be swiping away at some tablet (assuming wifi reaches the veranda), reading a small phone screen (and piling up cellular data), or casually breezing through a trusty travel book? I’m going to choose the book most every time. And really -- crotchety old me talking now -- I'm traveling to Old Europe to get away from looking at my phone. I don't need to constantly pull it out so that I can update LiveTrekker.

Many Travel Apps are designed for single and business travelers. Need to fly NYC-DCA tomorrow? Yep, and app can be very helpful there. But for long range planning – and you are planning this in advance, right – a mobile app is indeed mostly useless: you’ll want to plan using desktop pages, plus pen & paper. You can’t replicate via an app the process you use for finding flights as I outlined before. Hopper tries to tell you when the best time to fly is, but Google is still closer.

Options Away has a different take: it let you hold a reservation for longer than the usual 24 hours, up to 3 weeks. You pay a fee for the length of the hold, $5 to $50. It's flight price insurance, and, as a rule, I insure catastrophic expenses, and leave smaller expenses uninsured. I.e., don't buy the three year protection plan on the toaster. In the Options Away scheme, you'll come out behind, on average, otherwise they wouldn't make money.

Now, we all know that there's a big difference between mostly useless and all useless. Mostly useless is slightly useful. I stick with apps for dining, and for maps. TripAdvisor serves me well on the former, though I have Yelp added, too; for the latter I use Google Maps. Works in Europe, though not quite everywhere, as we've probably all discovered. I relied on Google to get us to our B&B in Tuscany last time, which was a huge fail, since the town was so small Google had decided not to bother with it. We had to get the B&B owners to come fetch us. I won’t make that mistake again, nor should you. Get paper directions.

Apart from that, I did use Google Maps to navigate my way through the streets of Venice late at night – it worked, and was one of the more enjoyable experiences I’ve ever had. And we’ve used Trip Advisor (or Yelp) to find good restaurants close to us at any given moment, on more than one occasion. Apps, mobile apps especially, are good fall-backs for when a plan has to change or you want to add some spontaneity to the trip. And the TripAdvisor ratings on food are generally pretty good, once you filter for the quirks (coffee shops tend to get lumped in with dining, and have high ratings). Now, especially on food, I find a critic’s recommendation to be favored over mass reviews, but it’s mildly heartening to see how often the two overlap.

Other apps & categories you can consider, but I generally reject:

·        Hotel & airline booking. See above – hopefully you’ve arranged all of this well in advance.

Public Transport apps. Could be very useful – these apps, like Moovit, help you use public transport in big cities efficiently. It’s likely that the big city you’re going to has its own app, but as far as I can tell, Moovit works well nearly everywhere. Though I’ll probably end up with Uber. Or a good old cab.
Walking guide apps. There are several that let you download a walking tour of a city, and you press play and follow along. A virtual guided tour! I’ll tell you what I prefer: do your own research first, and then give your family the guided tour yourself. You’ll have fun finding all the points of interest you’ve only read about, and your kids will enjoy listening to you more than some guide, live or recorded.
Organization apps: TripIt is the granddaddy here, an itinerary and reservations organizer. There’s an app called Tripomatic that lets you plan your trips – explore sights and set itineraries. Sounds good, but it's all a little clumsy in execution, and really, I don't want my phone pinging to tell me it's time to move on to the next sight. Next post, I’ll show you my detailed method for planning the trip. Yes, it’s a non-digital approach, you’ll have to purchase some physical goods, but I like it – read, and you can decide from there.

·        Packing apps: PackPoint lets you enter your destination, dates, and preferred activities, and builds a packing list for you. “Pack five pairs of socks” – fine, if you must. This is Europe, it’s not exotic. The temperature is the main thing you really need to be worried about. I’ll have a section on packing later, though. I think these packing apps miss a few key points.

Lastly: if you’re going to get apps, also make sure you adjust your phone data plan. Most apps aren’t data heavy, but if you have your phone out, you’ll be using it, and you’ll rack up the GB’s.

We use AT&T, and they have different level travel plans – I’ll assume all carriers have figured this out by now. The plans set limits on usage, with overage costs, and have added perks (like city-wide wifi in some places). They terminate after one month automatically, to make it easy. Four years ago, I went for a cheap plan and nearly got scorched with an $800 bill when I returned – the moment I landed back in ATL my phone altered me of overages, although I had it set to do so in Europe. That is, you can’t trust the notices, and so I’ll generally opt to get the gold plan and not worry too much about it (note – I got out of the bill because I called right then and there and told them about the notification issue. Perhaps it works better now – that was six years ago).

Of course, if possible, pre-load any devices (especially kids devices, our boys have Kindles) with the entertainment they’ll want on the trip. Your in-flight entertainment isn’t guaranteed anymore (airlines tend to charge extra for that now) and there will be times when you’ll want a little piece and quiet yourself: electronic babysitter to the rescue. Download a few favorite movies before the flight. We have a portable DVD player, too, we’ll be bringing that. You’ll probably have wifi access somewhere on the trip to update, but again, don’t count on it – and if it’s there, it’ll cost.