Having the right apps is an essential part of travel these days. We’ve travelled a lot in Asia and Europe recently and the travel apps are sometimes different than in North America. When we arrive at any destination, we immediately buy a new SIM card to avoid roaming rates then we’re free to use all these apps easily. We generally buy one card with more data and we create a hotspot for our second phone.
Grab
In Asia, Grab is much more popular than Uber. We used Grab in Bali, Malaysia, Thailand, etc.
We also used it for food deliveries.
Google Maps
This might seem like an obvious one but there are certain features of Google Maps that I did not know about before this trip. Most importantly, did you know that you download city maps so that you do not need internet service to access them? This was super important when we first arrived somewhere and did not have a phone card yet.
We did so many things over Whatsapp this year. Instead of calling or emailing, we found sending a Whatsapp message to be the most simple form of reaching tour operators, restaurants and hotels. Almost all places in Asia and Europe use Whatsapp and it became our main way to contact people.
Seek
This app allows you to take a picture of a plant species and identify it. My kids love it and it is great to build a database of all the flora that we’ve observed around the world.
Geo Touch
This is our favourite game and has helped our daughters learn where different countries in the world are. By playing this they have become better than us at Worldle.
This was a great App to get them excited about the region we were about to visit.
Agoda
This is the main travel booking site in Asia. They almost always had the best rates for any hotel we wanted. I did not always agree with the ratings and reviews on the site but price couldn’t be beat most of the time. Be careful because prices on Agoda change all the time. We generally watch hotels for a few days before booking and even check on a different device. We once found price was 10% different when using two devices.
Family Travel Countdown 