Even though I have a Pinterest board dedicated to Travel Apps for Kids & Families, I have a confession to make.. I don’t use travel apps very often. Perhaps it’s because I don’t have an iPhone (yet), or perhaps it’s because I feel overwhelmed by zillions of options and little time to explore them, but I’ll admit I’m completely behind the times in this area.
So, I am thrilled to not only share today’s guest post with you but also to read and learn for myself about the thrifty ways you can use your smart phone while traveling.
The tips and tricks below are written by my friend and fellow travel planning nerd, Nancy. She’s currently a part-time expat and the inspiration behind many of our family’s hikes and outdoor adventures.
“Now, where do we go?”
Invariably, our arrival at any new destination starts with this question. My husband and son look at me as they ask, confident that I—omnipotent mommy and family travel planner—will have the answer for them.
In response, I whip out my not-so-secret weapon against the unknown: my iPhone.
Smart phones are the perfect travel tools. With a smart phone in your backpack, you have a compass, a GPS, a star gazing tool, an elaborate gaming system, a camera and a library of hundreds of books on a device that weighs less than a pound. (We’ve come a long way from the days when I would tear out irrelevant pages in my travel guide to reduce the weight of my pack.)
Perfect, right? Well, almost.
Smart phones come with one major limitation while travelling. Once you are outside the area covered by your local cellular provider, downloading and sending data, making phone calls, and sending text messages can get (really) expensive. We’ve all heard the stories of unfortunate souls who have forgotten this and ended up with an outrageous cell phone bill.
Top 3 thrifty tips for using your smart phone while travelling abroad:
1) Ask your cellular service provider if they have special international rates. Sometimes you can buy an international package that will reduce the costs for phoning and texting and will allow you a limited amount of data use abroad.
2) Buy prepaid local SIM cards when you land at your destination. These are usually found in supermarkets, drug stores, or kiosks all over the world. Use Google or a local expat forum to find out where to buy SIM cards, average rates, and recommended brands.
3) Simply turn off the cellular roaming data option on your phone and avoid making or receiving phone calls or text messages. (In other words, don’t answer any phone calls or texts.) Also, double check with your cellular service provider that you won’t be charged for incoming calls or texts, even if you don’t answer them.
Surprisingly, turning off the cellular data and ignoring the phone functions of my iPhone has been a good solution for me, especially when I have decent access to Wi-Fi to ease the pain of disconnection.
And, the lack of a cellular data plan doesn’t mean that you have to leave your phone at home while you are out and about. There are some easy ways to use your smart phone even when you don’t have a local plan or data abilities.
Four great tricks for using your smart phone without a data connection:
1) Use offline maps and navigation systems like Mapswithme and TomTom.
The GPS on your smart phone likely works even when you don’t have cellular data coverage. (You can Google the make and model number of your smart phone to check if your device has this ability).
To use the GPS system without cell access, you also need to have an offline map. There are offline maps available for most destinations, but our favourite offline map app is Mapswithme, an open source map system that covers most of the world.
Once you have downloaded the Mapswithme app, you then individually download the country maps that you will need on your trip. This feature allows you to choose only the maps you need in order to save space on your device.
The blue arrow shows your location on the map.
You can zoom into a high resolution view.
We have used this app to mark destinations like parking lots and trail heads; and we use it constantly when we are walking around a new place to find anything of interest. Mapswithme has saved us several times from taking the wrong turn while on a ramble through a new city.
Mapswithme also has lots of hiking and biking trails on it, which has been very helpful to us in New Zealand, North America, and Europe. My husband and I used the app on an overnight hike in New Zealand as a distance guide.
You can drop a pin on the map and then click on it to see how far away you are. The distance from your pin is shown underneath your arrow. Unfortunately, we are very far away from New Zealand right now.
You can place a pin on any destination and when you click on the pin, the info screen will tell you how far away you are from the pin in a direct line. You can also upload a trail map or travel route to Mapswithme and monitor your progress on a trip.
You can upload trails and routes to Mapswithme.
This app does have one major limitation: It doesn’t provide spoken directions when driving.
When we do need navigation help for driving, we use an offline navigator from TomTom. This is an expensive app, but it has proven useful several times and was well worth the value. Mapswithme is a good companion to the TomTom app. If I’m unsure of where TomTom is leading us, I double check with Mapswithme.
2) Download offline travel guides with Scribd.
I use Scribd, a subscription-based app that lets me download an unlimited number of books for a very reasonable price (under $10 per month). The Scribd library includes all of the Lonely Planet guides, and other travel guides as well.
On a recent trip to Provence, I downloaded the Lonely Planet guide for this area onto my phone before we left. When we visited a new city, I would look up the city in the guide, choose the most important sights, and take advantage of the highly detailed maps in the book to figure out where we needed to start and what we wanted to see.
In addition, I use Scribd extensively just for reading. Imagine taking your local public library with you on a trip. Bonus!
A list of all of the travel books that I have downloaded to my device in Scribd.
3) Store travel plans and electronic tickets in Google Drive.
I usually make extensive travel itineraries for my family. It helps me know who has to be where and when. But I don’t like carrying paper. Google Drive is a service that lets you store and access documents from any computer or device. I create a folder for our trip in Google Drive, and I upload a detailed itinerary and all of the reservation and ticket documents to this folder.
To ensure that I have access to our travel documents even when I don’t have a data connection, I open the Google Drive app on my phone, open the documents I might want to access, and check off the option which will prompt the system to keep on offline version on my device. I’m sure that this would also work with other online storage systems like Dropbox .
The advantage of storing your documents in Google Drive or Dropbox is that you can access them in a pinch from any device or computer.
My travel folder in Google Drive.
Offline versions of boarding passes. Note that I have checked the “Keep an online version” option.
4) Find free Wi-Fi.
I’ve become good at finding free Wi-Fi when I need to really connect. Free Wi-Fi is less common in Europe and New Zealand than in North America, but it does exist. For instance, Starbucks in Germany offers a free connection for two hours. This does help take the edge off life without a good Internet connection.
I have used the Wi-Fi Finder app, but have found it to be out-of-date. I’ve had better luck just keeping my eyes open. A couple of weeks ago in Switzerland, we visited Chillon, a medieval castle and popular tourist destination that offered free Wi-Fi with the price of admission.
Although I do prefer to be connected to the Internet at all times (like every minute of the day!), I have found travelling without a data connection to be possible and even preferable as I’m not constantly worried about how much money I’m spending every time I check the map.
And I’m still always able to tell my family where we are and where we should head to next!
So, how do you use your smart phone while travelling? Any other tricks to share?
Nancy (aka Twigg3d) is a Canadian traveller, writer, teacher and iPhone addict. In recent years, she has been travelling with her husband and son back and forth between Canada, Germany and New Zealand. Anyone who knows her will find it hard to believe that she can survive without the Internet even for a minute.
Thrifty Travel Mama 
I think I have some new apps to download 🙂
Me too!
Fabulous. Absolutely golden.
Although let’s not forget there’s a certain old-fashioned charm to just shrugging, assuming it’ll sort itself out eventually, and devising a game of bowls using a torn-up receipt from your handbag in order to pass the time until things clarify themselves.
(I’m pinning this now for when recipt-bowls loses its old-fashioned charm.)
Definitely. Assuming there’s nowhere you have to be at a certain time and there’s little chance of actually getting lost, sometimes just exploring and figuring it out as you go along can be half the fun.
It’s also a lot harder to get genuinely lost that you might at first assume. Anywhere there’s any form of civilisation, for example, you’re pretty much only ever “temporarily misplaced”.
True, true.
Oh, I used to love tearing away pages from my travel guide when they were not needed anymore. It meant I had explored and learned some already 🙂
Good app tips, thanks!
I must have been to cheap to tear up a book that I spent money on :). I always used to just jot down notes on Post-Its about where I wanted to go/things I wanted to see. My maps and travel journals were filled with florescent stickys!
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