When you travel on business, you want to keep your mind free to focus on the work on hand, rather than bother with juggling itinerary details, expense reports and worries about the weather. Traveling with an inventory of the right apps can help cut down the anxiety, and leave you free to think about the things that really matter. These are the top business travel apps every jet-setting corporate type should have.
A hotspot finder can be invaluable
It can be a lifesaver to have a reliable way to find a hotspot wherever in the country or the world you may be. With a half-million hotspots on its database, WiFiMapper succeeds in finding something, no matter where you may be. The app can save you serious money in data plan expenses.
Keeping your travel information in one place
When you’re at the airport, you don’t want to have to look through your email to find what your seat number is or where your hotel is. You want everything in one place. This is what TripIt does for you.
It organizes all your travel information — tickets, boarding passes, hotel contact information — on one interface. If you’d like to keep all your travel rewards in one place, Award Wallet does it very well. Gate Guru always knows of last-minute boarding gate changes.
When you don’t understand
When your travels take you to parts of the world where English isn’t spoken, Google’s Translate has for long been helpful. It used to only work if you took the trouble to type things in by hand, however. Now, that’s no longer necessary.
Google Translate recognizes signs and printed instructions that it sees through the phone camera, and offers you real-time translations. It works very well as long as it has clear, non-stylized print to work with. If Google Translate doesn’t work too well for you, Quest Visual is another possibility.
MyBonami is a translation app that helps in a specific kind of situation — navigating restaurants. Not only does it offer automatic translations of menus, it lets you order on the app so that you can sidestep a difficult conversation with a waiter who only speaks a foreign language. If you do need to talk, it even gives you a list of phrases that you would want to use in such a situation.
Watching the weather
A reliable weather app on the phone may seem a no-brainer, but big-brand weather apps often fail to update themselves, or to offer notifications when needed. Weather Live Free from Apalon Apps has been winning new users over for getting two things right — always staying updated with the latest weather, and reliably issuing notifications, no matter what model of Android phone a user may have.
Finally, maintaining properly updated expense accounts, complete with receipts, is one of those areas that trip business travelers up. While not keeping an expense account in good form may not throw a travel schedule out of gear, it does turn out to be a problem when a lost receipt makes you lose money. Expensify is a reliable solution to the problem.
With its SmartScan feature, it allows business travelers to scan and organize their receipts effortlessly. It also works seamlessly with credit card reports, importing expense statements wherever possible.
It only takes a little effort to put the best apps together for a better business trip. The results, in the form of less stress and more productivity, can be rewarding.
