With Thanksgiving and the Holidays coming up, we wanted to share the best travel apps used by Wingz Team members. Each of the following apps, divided by category, will be valuable to you whether you are a business or leisure traveler.
Booking and Organizing Trips
Founded in 2006, TripIt has long become the go-to app for both leisure and business travelers. It puts all of your booking details in one place and is very easy to use. Simply forward your emails with confirmation information for hotels, flights, and even restaurant reservations to TripIt, and the app pulls all the relevant details from the messages and compiles an itinerary for your trip.
Business traveler tip: The pro version sends you text messages with gate information for your flights and other important updates, such as cancellations and delays. You can also use the pro app to track all your rewards programs and receive notifications regarding upgrades and other benefits.
Being on an airplane is an annoying experience to start with but not as irritating as being assigned a terrible seat on the same plane. So if you don’t want to be near the bathroom or stuck in a middle seat, SeatGuru is your savior. Check your flight on their app and make sure you have the most advantageous spot on the plane for your particular needs. Every seat on the map is marked with potential advantages or disadvantages using a color coded system and individual notes.
Another favorite for business travelers, Google Trips allows you to combine organization and exploration into one easy-to-use app. In addition to storing your itinerary information (complete with details about flights, hotel bookings and car reservations), Google Trips offers built-in travel guides to more than 200 cities around the world, so you can step outside your hotel and explore with ease.
You just landed in a foreign country and are beyond excited, so you pull out your phones to tell loved ones you reached your destination safely but find you have no network and no wifi. What do you do?
Wi-Fi Finder takes the guesswork out of finding service by showing users free and paid public spaces with Wi-Fi available. This handy app works in a whopping 144 countries worldwide, and each Wi-Fi location is accompanied by a phone number (if there is one available) so you can call from the app to confirm locations, rates and hours.
Expenses
Just like TripIt, which it acquired in 2011, Concur is a must have for the road warriors of the world. Its free app is widely considered the gold standard for travel expense tracking. You can snap photos of receipts and file them directly through the app, sending information for reimbursements while you travel.
Business traveler tip: Concur also offers a variety of business intelligence, travel, and invoice-related solutions.
Airport Survival
Whether you travel once every blue moon or multiple times per month, LoungeBuddy is for you. Their free app identifies airport lounges near you, pointing out which ones require membership and which ones you can access for free or a small fee. You can also book lounge space (when available) through the app and browse lounges at various destinations.
Another guru you can add to your roster of travel apps! GateGuru will keep you posted in real-time on any updates to your itinerary such as security wait times, flight delays, gate changes or layover time adjustments. Tapping the airport code will also bring you to airport specific information such as shops, restaurants and other amenities in both domestic and international airports.
Business traveler tip: you can connect it to TripIt.
Going through customs can be brutal even if you have all your documents ready. Mobile Passport, an app built in partnership with US Customs and Border Protection and the Airports Council International, helps you breeze through Customs. Create your profile and you are set! Forget about having a pen and filling out documents, everything you need will be in the app. It is currently available in 24 airports and 1 cruise port.
Loyalty Program
Playing the rewards program game can be as complicated and time consuming as playing fantasy football or keeping up with Kardashians. Award Wallet does all the work for you by tracking points and miles for all your loyalty programs. They also notify you when your balances change and before your points expire.
Transporation
When traveling, as highlighted by the nine apps above, you need all the help you can get and that’s exactly what we are here to do. At Wingz, our only goal is to give you peace of mind both while you are planning your trip and on the day of. We let you book your ride in advance without surge pricing and create a favorite driver list so you can have a familiar face picking you up. Does it get any better?