Once upon a time, travelling was probably a romantic, glamorous activity. Clinking champagne glasses in first class and all.
Anyone who’s set foot in an airport recently knows this is not the case any more. Travelling is one security check away from unbearable.
To help us through to the departure gate, there’s technology.
In the iTunes App store, there are currently 4,678 iPad apps and a whopping 21,864 iPhone apps dedicated to a smoother trip. That’s more travel apps than news and social media apps combined. (In case you’re counting, in the Android Market there about 1,200 travel-themed apps compared to less than 1,000 news apps.)
And that’s not even including websites.
The fact of the matter is, none of these will ever solve any of the world’s mobility problems. The conspiracy theorist in me believes there is a cure for the hassles of travel: the all-encompassing, user-focused travel tool. But if it’s released, all the lucrative sites, apps and deal-finders will be obsolete.
With that in mind, here are my favourite tools.
For flight and hotel, nothing beats HipMunk.
Built by the brains behind Reddit, HipMunk makes good on its claim to “take the agony out of travel.” (It’s sort of unclear which “agony” they’re referring to, but in fact it’s a search parameter that takes out stopovers.)
HipMunk is powerful because it doesn’t just aggregate Expedia, Orbitz and all the rest of the early dot-com travel agencies. It pulls from airlines, which you can simply go to and book your ticket, no third-party sign-up required.
It also doesn’t sell you any ungodly packages, which inevitably include a casino or a Hard Rock Café.
If packages make things easier, LivingSocial’s Escapes version of the travel package is decent. LivingSocial is one of those group-buy sites typically associated with electrolysis and spa deals, but here there are genuinely interesting travel destinations across North America (Stowe, Vermont, or Tamarindo, Costa Rica, for instance). This was the model for the recently announced and still inferior Groupon Getaways.
Kayak, which aggregates the likes of Orbitz, functions just like others in this class of travel sites – momondo.com, wego.com, etc – but has luxurious mobile platforms. Try the iPad app and see the difference.
For packing, there’s Packing, an iPhone app that takes inventory of what you bring and bring back. As advertised, it does just that.
Once there – when “there” is somewhere in North America – try Eat Street, the Food Network’s Canadian-made street food finder. Taco trucks, grilled cheeses and all kinds of other finds in every city make for cheap tourist-trap-proof grub on the road.
Besides eating, tourism usually involves a taxi ride or two. For that, download Taxi Magic, which grabs the nearest cab to you.
All this goes a long way toward easier trips, but it’s still very far from fixing travel. Where to next?
joshuae@nowtoronto.com | twitter.com/joshuaerrett
