Five Advantageous Apps For Domestic Travel

You're planning a family vacation, spring break with friends, or a soul-searching road trip across the US. You're going somewhere you've never gone before, somewhere you haven't been to in ages, or somewhere you want to explore thoroughly. You can live vicariously through recommendations from friends or simply perform a google search, but how can you take your travel experience to the next level? The answer is technology through mobile applications. The five I've chosen cover all the travel essential categories: booking, coupons, photos, documentation, and entertainment. Leverage your smartphone or iPad and download these five free Advantageous Apps for Domestic Travel available on all devices.


Kayak- Kayak is one of the best sites for booking services. It lets you look for cheap flights, hotels, and car-rentals and pre-pay for them if you so desire. It lets you map out your trip agendas, tracks to see if your flight is on time, lets you know when the price you're thinking about paying changes, syncs to Gate Guru (an app that I will cover in my next blog), lets you see airfare trends, and even has a currency converter within it. Need I say more?


Yelp- Yelp is personally one of my favorite apps, and I'm pleased it makes the list for best travel apps. Self defined, "Yelp is an online urban city guide that helps people find cool places to eat, shop, drink, relax and play, based on the informed opinions of a vibrant and active community of locals in the know. Yelp is the fun and easy way to find, review and talk about what's great — and not so great — in your world." You can search anything from enchiladas to Urban Outfitters and it will show you how close you are to them and how long it will take to get there. It also provides you with great deals to make your trip worth every dollar.

Pocket Ranger- Pocket Ranger is a State Park Guide at the tip of your fingers. If you're the outdoorsy type, are looking for beautiful park scenery to eat your lunch, need a new running path, or are even just wanting to take the kids out of the hotel to let them run around- this is the app for you. Simply download whichever the Pocket Ranger for whichever state you will be in. My favorite function of it is "Parks Near Me". This lets you incorporate your GPS settings and instantly see how far away you are to a park. For example, I'm in Cedar Falls and it comes up with the results displayed above. 

Photaf Panorama (Android)- This awesome app allows you to take panoramic photos of every sunset, scenic exclusion, and even your beautiful college campus in the early AM. It can upload directly to Facebook, and lets you move the image around on your phone to see each and every angle.  

Photosynth (Apple)- Photosyth is the Apple equivalent and takes Photaf a step further by adding in a social element. You can see other people's panoramic images and search popular ones. Download these apps for your own optimal travel photo taking experience!

Trip Journal- The Trip Journal app was rated as a #1 Travel App by Google. It lets you do tracking, recording, documenting and sharing. It is a very simple way to pull together all the aspects of your vacation since it is integrated with Google Earth. My favorite aspect is saving my locations, pictures, and notes in the same place so I can share them  more easily and keep separate trips organized as shown below.

What other apps do you use for domestic travel? Have you had any good experiences with any of the apps above? For all of you international travelers- stay tuned for the next blog!