Mobile devices, Software

Travel Apps for iPhone and Android to Find The Perfect Holiday Destination

Planning a vacation is stressful, half of the battle is finding the time to sit down and plan everything out. Travel agents are quickly becoming a thing of the past, and you often need to coordinate everything yourself. To add to the chaos of planning a vacation, you are planning the trip around the holiday season, essentially guaranteeing higher costs, blackout dates, and fully booked accommodations.

With the advancement of cell phones, you can now not only plan your holiday escape from your device, but you can put everything together and make the trip one to never forget.

Kayak

kayak

Kayak is the number one travel app available on either the App store or the Android market today. They not only search directly to the hotel and airlines, but through other travel engines. If they find a cheaper price through Expedia or another website, you can use their deals through Kayak. Once you have set up an account, you can save your searches and the app will also fill the majority of your information to speed up the process. You can book your flight, rent a hotel, and get a rental car all through the Kayak website, depending on your needs.

When booking a flight, you enter your departure and return date, the airlines you are flying to and from, and the number of passengers and it will conjure your results. You can filter the results by choosing what cabin you would like to be in, as well as if it will be a multi-city flight. When the results are shown, they will be listed by price, but you can change the sorting by time of arrival or the number of layovers.

Hotels are the next booking aspect, and it remains just as easy as choosing your flight. Simply choose the city that you are looking to vacate to, enter the dates and the number of rooms/guests. It will display all the hotels, and I do mean all of them. There are filters available to restrict the results to something more suitable.

You can restrict by price, the star ratings, or a specific hotel brand (such as the Holiday Inn). From there you can look at the hotels and decide which the best is. If you are having troubles, than use the Trip Advisor App which we will look at later. Once you have picked that perfect hotel, click on the book marker and enter your information. If you have logged into your account or through Facebook most of the information should already be entered for you.

Rental Cars are another part of booking a vacation and can easily be done through Kayak. They search for the best deals depending on your preferences and location. You can schedule to pick up your car at one airport and drop it off at another as well directly through the website.

Download Kayak for Andoid

Download Kayak for Iphone

Trip Advisor

tripadvisor-app

This is the app to help you fill your holiday getaway with everything you wanted to do. You can research and consider all that your destination has to offer. This is also the perfect tool when you are deciding between two different locations. You can read user ratings based on what they have experienced and witnessed at those places already. They are given score out of five stars, and all of them are given a numeric ranking against the other attractions in the area.

Hotels can be tricky to choose, and while you want to book the best vacation possible for your family and or spouse, the price is not always a direct reflection of that. Many times there are three star hotels that that offer just as grand customer service and responsibility as a five star hotel does. Through Trip Advisor you have the ability to read many different reviews about the hotel and see its ranking against other local hotels. You may be surprised that some of the best ranked hotels are the ones that offer both a great price and customer relations.

Staying at the hotel is only part of your remarkable holiday vacation, and Trip Advisor can help to decide on what you want to do while you are away. When you boot up the app, choose the "Things to do" section and it will give you a similar list as the hotels did. Which are similar in the ranking system and customer reviews, but for all of the activities available.

It can give you the location, address, phone number, and nearby locations to help you plan your trip. It can be a bit irritating to try to pack your holiday adventure when you have to drive across town a dozen times to see everything.

Download Trip Advisor for Andoid

Download Trip Advisor for Iphone

Tripit

Tripit

Booking a holiday destination can be worrisome, and needs to be done in advance to make sure you get the right hotel and flights you have been looking for. Some people book their flights and hotels months in advance, and life does not stop after you have booked everything. Stashing everything into a folder is almost certain to be lost (just your luck right?) and it can be a pain digging through all of the emails to find confirmation numbers.

Tripit is here to ease your mind and worries when it comes to traveling. You have the ability to save all of the information directly into this app, and it will create an organized, clear calendar with all of your activities, flight information, as well as important points you put in yourself. By forwarding your confirmation emails to plans @tripit.com, it will generate your calendar and itinerary for you as well as share it with everyone. The plans can be posted directly to Facebook for everyone to witness your amazing vacation.

Finding the perfect holiday retreat is difficult to do, and booking the hotels and flights can be just as troubling. Not only do you have options and apps that can help you in the process, but thanks to modern technology you can plan your entire holiday vacation directly from your smartphone or tablet.

Download Tripit for Andoid

Download Tripit for Iphone

Published on behalf of Andrew Gordon.

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