While I prefer writing stories about my travel experiences, I also hope to be a resource on how to travel. So if you’re looking for where to go or what to do, you are in the right place!

When I started traveling, the smart phone hadn’t even been invented yet. Does that make me sound old? Somehow, we figured out how to get around, managed to never get so lost we couldn’t be found, and still had unforgettable experiences. But now that we have the world at our fingertips, travel has become much smoother.

Here are my top 10 favorite travel apps to make your life easier

Maps.me

Offline maps changed the way I travel and is the number one app I use on all trips. It even comes in handy at home where cell service isn’t strong.

My favorite is Maps.me. Download the cities you’re visiting in advance so you can get GPS directions, find trails, hiking spots or lookouts, and never get lost again.

WhatsApp

People all over the world use WhatsApp to text message for free. We often communicated with friends we met, guesthouse owners and hotel front desks all through WhatsApp.

Rome2Rio

Use Rome2Rio for the best travel routes. This app will save you so much time and money. Enter your destination and the app gives you all available options with pricing and where to purchase tickets.

Xe Currency and Money Transfers

I use Xe solely for conversion rates. You can add multiple countries at a time and get up-to-date conversions when you need them.

Trip Advisor

Yelp is great in the US, but we’ve had better luck with Trip Advisor in every other country. Find the best places to eat, museums to visit, and trails to hike based on people’s reviews and photos.

Google Translate

The translations aren’t always perfect, but this app has helped us through tricky situations more times than I can count. The best part about this app is you can take a photo of a sign or record someone talking and get a general translation. You also can download languages to use off-line when you don’t have cell service.

Booking.com

In the US, we use Hotels.com more often, but Booking.com is most commonly used in other countries. You can usually book in advance and pay when you arrive to your hotel.

Tripit

This app connects to your email and automatically pulls out your flight and hotel reservations and adds them into one itinerary so you can see everything in one place. It’s most helpful at airports when you need flight confirmation numbers, times, etc. and saves you from searching through old emails.

Kayak

This is often how we find the best deals on flights. I will do a post all about how to find the cheapest flights, but Kayak is a great place to start! Use the “Explore” option to find the best deal to anywhere in the world throughout the year.

Google Photos

We used Google Photos to automatically upload all of our iPhone photos in one place. We liked knowing that if we ever lost or broke one of our phones, we wouldn’t lose every travel photo we’d taken.

There are so many other helpful options out there, these are just the apps that we used the most often on our round the world trip and that we still use today. Do you have a favorite I didn’t list? Send it my way!