Top 5 Travel Apps for iPad & iPhone

Whether for business or pleasure, the last thing you want to worry about when traveling is traveling itself.  These top 5 travel apps for iPad & iPhone will help ease your woes from the wee reservation stages to your homecoming. (If you’re taking an iPad on vacation, definitely consider an iPad keyboard & case.)

WorldMate

Download: WorldMate App

This is the definitive travel app for jetsetters looking to keep a tight schedule.  Not only can you start planning for travel with WorldMate by searching for flight schedules and making hotel reservations, you can synchronize your entire itinerary to your iPhone or iPad and share your calendar or WorldMate Live online travel planner with colleagues.  For users short on time, there’s a mobile travel dashboard that shows all of your information at-a-glance.

Those are the essentials; WorldMate comes with more.  If your flight is delayed, canceled, or diverted, WorldMate sends an alert to your phone or tablet.  If you get to your destination but your ride is missing or your reservations have been canceled, you can look up hundreds of other airlines, hotel chains, and car rental agencies.  Destination times are in the respective time zones (no more guess work), and you even get a 5-day weather forecast for any location, a built-in tip calculator and tipping guide, and a world clock.

Footprint Travel Guides

Download: Footprint Travel Guides App

If you’re leaning more towards tours than business meetings, consider Footprint.  It acts as your own tour guide, providing you with the best places to eat, sleep, and play, and all of those places’ contact details, opening times, prices, and what others had to say about them.

Don’t worry about the outrageous roaming charges, either—it functions offline.  A travel guide to Cape Town comes free with the current release and more will be added frequently.  The app itself is free.

Packing (+TO DO)

Download: Packing (+TO DO!)

We all know that sinking feeling when we’ve forgotten to pack something.  Packing (+TO DO) is a fail-proof packing list that doesn’t harp on you like Mom and Dad used to.  The app seems overly simple at first, like you might be better off just writing a list in good old fashioned pencil and paper.  Fortunately, the app also features nifty bits like packing ideas and suggestions from sample lists and customizable templates.  If you write something down manually, you run the risk of losing the list or missing an item that needed to be to begin with, but with Packing (+TO DO), you trim down these risks for only $0.99.

Lonely Planet Phrasebook

Download: Lonely Planet Phrasebook

Will you be exploring the night life in Rome or communicating with potential clients in Tokyo?  Lonely Planet’s reliable phrasebooks are available for your iPhone or iPad in 31 languages, including help with phonetic pronunciations, audio translation, local text, and over 600 phrases that cover everything from reservations to drinks.  Admittedly, you won’t be getting the full language experience (reviewers say the Spanish and Cantonese apps are sparse) but it’s a good standby for emergencies.  Bonus: no roaming charges since it works offline.

What’s the Rate?

Download: What’s the Rate?

This is no simple currency converter.  What’s the Rate offers recent foreign exchange rate trends in over 80 currencies, insight from Thomas cook and other providers, and even a customizable RateWatch for a currency of your choice.  You will not only get a better feel for how much money you’ll be spending abroad, you can also have the exchange rate on your side wherever you go.  The app will even send you an email notification to let you know when to buy currency on which you’ve put a limit.

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Guest post by Heather Green. Born and raised in North Carolina, Heather Green has worked as a fashion and beauty consultant as well as freelancing for various fashion, health, and tech publications. She currently acts as the resident blogger for Online Nursing Degrees where she’s been researching travel nursing programs as well as the wonderfully happy topic of infectious disease nursing programs.

Main image by jorgeq82