My favourite travel websites and apps for managing trips
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The internet is littered with articles listing the best travel apps and websites …. but in my experience, none of them are particularly useful.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that if you are using Airbnb you should download their app, or the Avios app for managing your Avios. That’s all pretty rudimentary stuff!
But after five plus years working at Head for Points, I’ve come to rely on a handful of tools and resources that make travelling so much easier, all the way from planning and booking to the actual travel and, finally, logging everything I do.
I occasionally mention these in the comments or my annual travel round-up and often get questions, so I thought it would make an interesting piece. Hopefully one or two of the resources listed below are new to you and of genuine use.
The best apps and websites for planning travel
Flight Connections
As someone who writes about airlines a lot, I often find myself asking where they fly or what their route network looks like.
Although you’d think airlines would make this information easy to access on their website by publishing a route network, this is often not the case – which is where Flight Connections can help.
Flight Connections is a website that shows you every single route operated by any airline in the world, all on a single map.
The basic concept is very simple but the best thing about Flight Connections is that it lets you filter by airline, airport, airline alliance and more. Want to know where Oman Air (joining oneworld this year) flies? No problem, you can see that for free in one click.
To drill down by alliance, class, aircraft, flight duration and more you have to sign up to premium ($3.33/month). I find I generally only need to filter by airline so I just use the basic free tier but it’s a very useful resource nonetheless, and something I’d definitely consider paying for.
(As per the comments below, flightsfrom.com is an alternative.)
Great Circle Mapper
Whilst a lot of loyalty programs are going revenue-based, there are still programmes that award miles and tier points based on miles flown. But how many miles is it between, say, London and Hong Kong?
Great Circle Mapper is a long standing tool that does the hard work for you, and a lot more besides. It was originally launched in 1996 and looks a bit dated, but it’s very powerful if you know how to use it.
Simply inputting the origin and destination airports will tell you the most direct distance between them. You can also map aircraft ranges against an origin airport and even draw maps for reference.
Note that it is not on https:// so it may trigger a warning in your browser.
www.gcmap.com
The best apps and websites for organising travel
TripIt
Last year I flew 81 times. Keeping track of all those trips can be exhausting, especially because details are scattered across email confirmations, booking updates and more.
TripIt makes managing all that much easier. Part of what makes it so useful is that I can simply email my booking confirmations and it will automatically process them, highlighting my itinerary in more visual and user-friendly ways.
I can quickly check my flights, copy and paste a booking reference or see where I still need to book accommodation or flights. When I’m travelling, I don’t need to dig through hundreds of emails to find the information I’m looking for.
As an organisational tool, TripIt’s free tier is very good. If you want live updates (such as when to go to your gate, which baggage carousel your flight is using etc) then you can pay $49/year for TripIt Pro. The free tier is good enough for me, however.
The best apps and websites when travelling
Flighty
Flighty is a relatively new app – and only available for iPhones – but one that I find indispensable. Flighty is not an organisational tool but allows you to keep track of your flights in real time.
Flighty connects to airlines’ internal scheduling systems to see where your plane is and when it is due to arrive. I have no idea how it works but it’s incredibly accurate and will often show delays before airline staff know or have announced it.
For example, it will show if your aircraft is arriving late and what impact that will have on your trip. Through some clever machine learning it can predict how long your flight will be delayed and the likely departure time. In my experience, it is very accurate.
The free plan is pretty basic but if you travel a lot I highly recommend upgrading to the Ultimate plan for $47.99 a year, which comes with a lot of the real-time updates and alerts. Well worth it in my opinion.
flighty.com (iOS only)
Airalo
We covered Airalo in a separate article yesterday but I wanted to cover it again in this list. I travel all over the world, and if I simply relied on my network’s services I’d have long ago spent my own bodyweight in gold on excessive roaming charges.
To save money, we used to buy physical SIM cards locally when arriving at our destination. These days ubiquitous eSIM technology has made the process much smoother and simpler. It can now all be done remotely on your phone with a single app. All you have to do is search for the country, select the amount of data you require, purchase and install it.
Airalo was one of the first companies to offer data eSIMS for foreign countries with over 200 country-specific, regional or global eSIMS ready to download within minutes.
I now spend just 30 seconds in the lounge before my flight downloading one of these so that I can access data services affordably as soon as I land. You can read my full article on Airalo here.
If you want to try Airalo, then you can use my referral code ‘RHYS4258’ when you sign up or at checkout to get $3 off. I’ll also get $3 off my next plan – thank you. The comments to the article yesterday cover other eSIM operators used by readers.
The best apps and websites for logging travel
My FlightRadar24
You’ve probably heard of FlightRadar24 before. It is one of the leading flight-tracking websites and relies on crowdsourced data to make it work.
But did you know it also offers a service called My FlightRadar to log all your flights, past and future? I’ve been using it to track my own flying patterns for years. All you have to do is enter the date and flight number and it will automatically populate everything else for you. You can enter additional information for which cabin you were in, your seat number and more.
The result, once you’ve added your flights, is a beautiful flight map as well as statistics on your own flying including your most popular routes, airports, airlines and cabins. If you’re curious what it looks like, you can see my profile here. The service is free.
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