5 Best FREE Travel Apps of 2019
We get a lot of people asking where we find our travel deals and how we go about planning/booking them. Below I’ve compiled my favorite 5 apps that I use to not only find deals, but that I use on a regular basis to search for deals, research a destination, and make traveling that much easier! I strongly recommend you download all 5 of these right now. And I’m sure by the end of this, you’ll agree with me!
1. Sky Scanner
This app is designed as a flexible flight searching tool, and boy does it do that well. It lets you do everything you wish traditional search engines would let you do.
Instead of the traditional flight search where you must select both an origin and a destination, and put in specific dates of travel; sky scanner throws that model out the window. Let’s say you have a week that you already know would be great for you to take off work and travel, but you’re not 100% sure on where you’d like to go. Sky scanner will allow you to put in your home airport, select the dates you’d like to travel, then set the destination to “everywhere”. That’s right, everywhere. It will then proceed to show you the cheapest places to fly from your city on that given week!
Maybe you know where you want to go already and you’re just curious when the cheapest time to fly there is. You can put in your origin and destination, and set the date to “anytime”. Sky Scanner will then show you the cheapest dates to fly that given route.
As I’m sure you can see, this is a powerful flight searching tool. We typically use this app to figure out approximately what month of the year will have the cheapest fares available for a specific destination.
If you are a leisure traveler, this needs to make its way onto your phone right now!
2. Oyster
UPDATE** - Oyster has recently discontinued their app on the app store but the website is still just as useful!
Do you ever wish there was one place you could go to find trustworthy and accurate hotel/resort reviews? This app is our go-to for checking on the quality of hotels or properties we’re not familiar with.
Oyster has a team of “professional investigators” that they send out to visit properties “like your mother-in-law would”, their words. They organize their reviews in a super easy to read “Pro’s and Con’s” list as well as giving you “The bottom line” for each property. Here’s an example from the Tabacon Resort in Costa Rica; it looks something like this:
The other perk of researching properties on oyster is that they take their own photos of the property. If you’re curious about why this is a big deal check out this article. They upload their own completely un-doctored and raw photos so that you get an accurate representation of what to expect when you arrive!
Also, if you have set dates already, Oyster will show you prices from several online travel agencies (Think Expedia, Travelocity, Priceline etc.) to help you get a ballpark idea on pricing for your dates.
3. Air Bnb
This seems like a no-brainer, however, I still meet people all the time who still feel like Air BnB is a bit mysterious and are leary to trust it. Let me just tell you, Air Bnb is 100% legitimate and safe. As long as you do your research just as you would any other hotel or property, you will be fine. You can check out our article here on how to find and enjoy an incredible Air Bnb!
While we don’t use Air BnB for every single trip we take, it does offer some awesomely unique opportunities. For starters, Air Bnb allows you to experience destinations from a local’s point of view. Instead of staying in a tourist bubble, you can get out a bit and experience the place from the perspective of a local. It also is a great way to experience luxury in a way different from the typical resorts and hotel offerings. Often, it is a fraction of the cost compared to a luxury hotel. You would be hard pressed to find properties like this luxury bungalow in Bali, or this unique residence with your own private pool in Morrocco, through traditional hotel booking sites.
This is the main reason we love Air Bnb, is for the unique accommodations it is able to offer. After all, we all love a little adventure right?
Get $40 off your first Air Bnb Booking stay!
4. Travel Pirates
IOS / Android
This is probably one of the best-kept secrets in the travel industry. I honestly don’t know why this little powerhouse of an app doesn’t get more exposure but let me tell you I’m not joking when I say that I have never found better or more usable travel deals than on this single app.
While it is owned by Kayak, the offers that it has stretch way beyond the online travel booking site. Travel Pirates has several categories of deals, There are flights, hotels, cruises, or vacations. Vacations are essentially package deals that include flights, and accommodations, sometimes with some excursions thrown in. Through this app, we discovered crazy deals like $99 flights to Dublin Ireland, A 7 day trip to Cairo Egypt, with flights, a hotel and a guided tour of the pyramids for $900/person! We found $340 round-trip airfare from the US to Beijing and luxury treehouses in Bali from $35/night! There is usually anywhere from 5–20 new deals posted every single day!
UPDATE** - Travel pirates has re-launched their app and it looks something like this now:
Now on a practical note, you don’t actually book the trips through Travel Pirates, it simply finds all of the deals being offered from airlines, hotels, travel agencies and travel suppliers and compiles them all in one place for you. Then you just follow the links if you’re wanting to book them!
Needless to say, if you’re on the hunt for any sort of travel deals, do yourself a favor and download this one now.
5. Mobile Passport
IOS / Android
Finally, this app is the unsung hero of international travel. This app beats out global entry, TSA pre, Clear, any of those other ones you’ve heard of, and best of all, just like the rest of the apps on this list, it’s completely 100% FREE. It was actually designed and released by the US Department of Homeland security and TSA in an effort to help cut down on waiting time for US citizens re-entering the country.
Mobile Passport is your ticket to absolutely breezing through customs. This is how it works:
Download the app from the app store
Enter your own personal passport information (Do NOT make any mistakes or typos as this will defeat the whole purpose, and they are very strict about it)
Enter anyone’s passport info who is traveling with you and shares a home address with you (Spouse, children etc.). You will also need to take a passport worthy selfie at this stage.
When on your flight back into the US, follow the steps given to you on the app. It will have you specify how you are entering the country and digitally complete all necessary customs forms (Usually takes less than 5min.)
Once you’ve landed back in the US (Before you get off the plane), Complete the form and click submit.
Once you get to the US customs area, you will see plenty of signs for “mobile pass” users. Now instead of looking at those signs like everyone else thinking “hmm I wonder what that is or how I get that?”, you can zoom past the herds of people up to the front of the line and proceed straight to the customs officer.
My dad was recently traveling from South Africa back to the US and was using mobile pass for the first time. When he landed, he said that after passing up the standard lines for US citizens, as well as a semi-lengthy global entry line, he was one of 3 people in the mobile pass line and it took him 5 minutes total to get through customs. If that’s not a win I don’t know what is!
The only caveat to this is that mobile pass is only available for certain cities at the moment. You can see a list of those cities here.
6. BONUS APP** — Tripit
IOS / Android
This App is sort of a not-so-hidden gem! I’ve found that most people have heard of Trip It at some point, but they are either unaware that there is a free version, or unaware of how truly powerful and useful it is! So check it out.
All you have to do is sign up for a free account, connect your email, and BOOM. It automatically pulls in any sort of reservation it can find in your inbox. This includes flights, hotels, rental cars, dining reservations, Event tickets, and just about anything with a confirmation number!
It also automatically (and rather intelligently I might add) organizes your reservations into “trips” for you. For example, if it sees that you’ve booked a flight April 1st through the 9th, it would automatically put any other reservations within that date range into the same trip for you. This screenshot below shows an example from our trip to Europe last year. Keep in mind, I did not input a single thing manually. All of the information shown below, TripIt extracted from confirmation emails in my inbox and organized:
One other fun thing is that TripIt tracks all of your travel stats based off of your confirmation emails, AND it’s retroactive which means it will go back and pull in everything it can find. Here’s a glimpse at my all-time stats as tracked by Trip it!
While this may not be super helpful, it is fascinating to see!
Lastly, you can export a PDF document of your entire itinerary to have offline before you travel that way you have all of your important details saved such as addresses, confirmation numbers, times etc. All of it will be available to you whether you have internet or not when you land!
We hope this article was helpful! As always if you have any questions don’t hesitate to message us. Comment below your experience with any of these apps or if there are any others you think we should know about!