Cab aggregators like Uber and Lyft dominated much of 2016, as ride-sharing became a mainstream concept. It became abundantly clear that people prefer to go cashless when it comes to travel. 2017 promises to be equally unique as new and existing travel apps offer a plethora of new services to excite and entertain the modern-day traveller.
While there os no shortage of apps that make travel easier, these are the top 5 travel apps in 2017 that can help you cover each and every aspect of your travel experience:
Google Trips
Google has become a household name in the travel sector with Google Flights, and it seems to have truly upped the ante with Google Trips. If you’re interested in controlling just about every aspect of your travel itinerary, Google Trips is perfect for you. It makes it easy to gather all related travel information from your inbox and automatically organizes your itinerary. To make things as seamless as possible, it also offers full-day or half-day itineraries and customized suggestions of places of interest.
“We’re doing a great job on the planning stages, but we really need to help consumers when they’re actually at their destination,” says Richard Holden, a vice president of product management at Google.
What makes Google Trips so special is that it works while you’re offline, so you can spend less time hunting for free WiFi spots and more time actually enjoying the place you’re going to. The variety of suggestions offered for more authentic and less ‘touristy’ places is truly commendable.
AirBnb
Having dominated the holiday rental market for years, AirBnb recently turned its attention to experiences that allows locals to host experiences such as cooking classes, hiking tours, or just local experiences within their own community.
These ‘experiences’ allows travelers to meet and interact with knowledgeable hosts and enjoy highly personalized and unique travel experiences throughout the world. It’s a great way to quickly connect with a local destination through local knowledge and expertise. The hosts are all rated and reviewed allowing travelers to quickly identify the best local experiences.
Bookmundi
Active in more than 120 countries, boasting of over 1 million tour departures, and partnering with global heavyweights such as G Adventures, Trafalgar, Intrepid Travel and TopDeck, Bookmundi has quickly emerged as the premier holiday aggregator of 2016, primarily due to its seamless and simplistic booking features. In an age where holiday packages become more complex by the day, Bookmundi offers ease of booking and the site’s real time chat helps customers get completely customized travel offers from reputed travel providers around the world.
“The online tour booking segment will continue to evolve fast, among others, allowing for easier, faster and more dynamic contact between customers and qualified local tour companies or travel experts around the world,” says Rasmus Juul-Olsen, managing director at Bookmundi.
One of Bookmundi’s standout features is its Get Travel Quotes feature that presents the customer with completely customized holiday packages from three to five tour companies in real time. These quotes are aggregated in one place for easy comparison, following which customers can book the best offer directly or engage with a chosen travel company using a real time chat feature.
Sidekix
Already present in more than 100 cities (and adding more each week), Sidekix is a popular city exploration app that presents downloadable city guides which feature recommended museums, shops, bars, coffee shops and more in any neighborhood of your choice. The app uses GPS technology and recommends nearby theaters, parks, stores, restaurants, museums, and bars as you walk around the area. If a particular destination sounds interesting, you can simply click on it to read customer experiences or curated content from local bloggers.
Features of interest include special guides for certain cities such as Tea Time in London or Christmas in New York that present recommendations revolving around a specific theme and season.
Tinder
Sure it’s not the first app that you’d think of while traveling, and certainly not the most conventional way of meeting new people either. But as it turns out, with 50 million registered users and 12 million matches per day, the popular dating app is truly emerging as a great way to meet new people in a new city. It makes the concept of setting up dates in a new city less intimidating and experiential travel far more enjoyable.
“We’ve always been about connecting people,” said a spokesperson for Tinder. “Tinder Social is another great way to get out tonight and connect with other people going out — with the same network, the same power and the same scalability that Tinder brought to dating.”
Tinder truly ups the social game with its new Social feature that lets entire groups connect with other groups using the app. It takes the pressure off of searching for locals and makes it feel less like a date, and more like a modern-age way to meet like-minded people.
Planning a vacation is one of the most exciting aspects of any holiday and these apps go a long way in making traveling easier and more enjoyable.
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