Our Go to Travel Planning tools and Resources!

Our Ultimate List of Travel Planning Tools & Resources to Make Your Journeys & Travelling Easier.

We keep getting asked what travel tools, apps, services or resources do we use to plan our trips and ensure we have a ton of fun wherever we go! We Looove to travel, it’s a known fact in our family and circles. Yet travel planning can be stressful if you don’t know where to start.

We have over the years tried, tested, and enjoyed some awesome, useful, some essential and some downright quirky online travel planning tools. Therefore, we have put together this Monster Ultimate Travel Tools Guide to help you simplify your trips be them business or pleasure and enjoy the planning process more.

We are not even touching on the best travel accessories that could be a blog for another day! Although we love the lil GoToob easily refillable liquid travel bottles, we usually take Ziploc bags. As stated in our earlier post on what not to pack for travel; save your cash by reading it here at a much lower cost. 🙂

So would you like to learn what travel planning tools we use? We hope you said heck yeah Paul & Jules!

It’s not just a couple of resources…This is the mother of all lists we could come up with, tried tested recommended. Resources that help us travel more efficiently and work our business anywhere. A bloggers job is never done and ideas pop up in the weirdest of places so we gotta be prepared. Our focus is on tools that get you Traveling, enjoying and getting there more efficiently and of course getting results. What we do appreciate about them is not only their great functionality but most of the apps have simple, understandable and intuitive user interface. These allow us to travel the world and live our lives by design!

We travel as much as we possibly can around our children’s school commitments and Pauli’s consultancy. To make our travel experiences more pleasurable, we always research and plan a lot. So without further ado below is our list of Travel planning tools & resources.

DreamTrips App – We wrote a full article on this amazing travel App. We cannot emphasize enough how amazing it is and how it has totally revolutionized travel planning not just for us but for millions of users worldwide and counting. With this app, most of the tools and apps below are redundant. You can register to be alerted when this App goes public here.

But we know most of our readers are not yet users of the amazing platform that offers this app at Zero cost for members. How would you like to have access to an app the does what half of the travel planning resources mentioned below do. Thus more space on your Android for more of your fun games?

This travel app rewards it users with benefits that equate to travel points that we can use for flights, meals, experiences or stays in many hotels and luxury locations! Users create our travel Bucket lists, plan our trips out, the attractions, restaurants we will eat at and earn even more benefits.

We book our flights and will 100% receive the difference back if that particular flight price drops before we travel. Also we can hire cars and plan our activities. We do have our very own 24/7 travel concierge.

You can learn more about the travel club here.

SkyScanner – find great value and often times the cheapest flights. Yes lots of resources online to find your flight worldwide, yet we find Skyscanner reliable. It compares very favourably with the Travel Club we are members of apart from several major differences and benefits mention in a detailed article here.

You can get lots of inspirations for your next trip based on flight prices. Click To Tweet

Try searching flights 9-12 months away to any destination. This is great for finding the cheapest flights over the year when we don’t have a specific destination in mind. Yet we know we will be travelling so we check…Gets our juices flowing (you know the feeling, right?) You can get lots of inspirations for your next trip based on flight prices. You don’t need to be specific with destination and if Europe is your general destination Skyscanner also searches low cost carriers like Wizzair, Ryanair, Easy Jet, etc. making it more cheaper for you Europe Travel Planning

Google Flights – This was our go to resource for checking the world map with available flights to numerous destinations and prices until we found even more resources mentioned herein.

Google Translate – This a great App to have on Android or iOS or simply got to google website. If you do have data and are lost or need some form of local help to the nearest exit to Taco-Bell or whatever; simply pull out your smartphone or gadget and show a local. Chances are some of the phrases will be down right hilarious or spelt wrong but you will get the help you need.

Accuweather – Well you don’t want to spend your whole vacation indoors with rain, storms and generally horrible weather coz you didn’t check the weather to your destination. Enter accuweather an awesome tool for planning trips. Always research about local weather throughout the year, find out the best time to visit a specific destination. You can check the weather for any destination for any month of the year. You’ll get weather predictions based on past years. Take a look at the data from the year before to be more sure of your chosen destination time and weather.

Booking – Wanna find and book or reserve a value or cheap hotel without payment, you can pay once you arrive, great if you find yourself otherwise engaged! Grab your 10% Discount when you use our Link above to make your next booking. And so will your friends!

TripAdvisor – Who doesn’t know this travel planning tool? Seriously you gotta check this out for reviews on all things travel related, Hotels, Flights, etc. And also compare prices at different times of the year! You can also find flights accommodation activities. You can write your own review of experiences at a specific location resort or hotel and its also an App downloadable to your smartphone. TripAdvisor is a treasure trove of travel tools…I am sure you agree! Thanks Czjai for the reminder!

Rome2Rio – a simple and yet very effective search travel engine where you can find travel routes for practically any journey. Simply type in your departure stage and your final destination, specific dates if you know them and this search engine will find and return lots of suggestions for you. From flights (flight information comes from Skyscanner), to buses, driving & train routes, even ferries.  Of course including costs or prices and estimated time frames of your journey. Great for comparison purposes esp with our own resource.

TravelNerd – You never have to go round in circles looking for airport gates, lavatories, Not anymore. If you are an iOS user, download this app. It features custom maps of terminals of the world’s 50 busiest airports. It includes ground transportation, locations of gates, bathrooms, etc. You can also use its cab-sharing feature to find other travellers headed in the same direction so you could buddy up and split cab face costs. I did this in Tampa FL, it was great. Cost me all of $5 inc. a tip to get to my hotel. 😉

Google Maps – no introduction needed for this amazing service for finding your way anywhere in the world. But for those moments without Internet or WiFi YOU MUST TRY…

Triposo – This is your quintessential FREE OFFLINE Smart Travel Guide. We can’t tell you how many times we have been without internet and looking desperately for a specific location, sans local lingo. Well you can now locate the train or bus station, pin point where you are, with these offline maps, guides and yours local features. So I would download this app NOW for your next trip both for iOS and Android users, no internet/data or Wi-Fi needed!

We know you gotta eat esp. on that long winding road trip in the USA, you can find your desired pit stop for your fav Maccies  or burger joint via…

iExit – We have learnt from several Road Trips both in UK and USA that, not all rest stops are created equal. So we now ensure we know how far our next meal, restroom stop and prawn & mayo sammich will be within the next 100 exits…seriously! You can also find out what they offer at each Pit stop how cool is that?

[clickToTweet tweet=”when you gotta go you gotta go so #SitorSquat #travelplanningtips” quote=”When you Gotta go you Gotta GO”]

And after maybe some dodgy tacos, or too much water you know when you gotta go you gotta go so enter…

SitOrSquat – this app available for both iOS and Android, shows you more than 100k public bog houses aka loos around your geo-location. These are sourced by users also recommend whether you can “sit” or “squat,” thus the name lolol…Seriously essential esp. if you got a bit of the tummy rums or remnants of holiday tum or maybe your kido needs to go, know what we mean! 😉

More Travel Planning Tools for finding that Cheapest Flight:

JetRadar – Search various airlines for really cheap tickets, yet another great tool.

Skypicker – an amazing tool to find really dirt cheap last minute flight prices.

Momondo – A smart resource to find more cheap flights.

Travel Tools for Finding Cheap Deals and Traveling anywhere:

Nomad List – Wanna find where you could be heading to next if you have no specific location in mind. Find prices for accommodation, the customs, and weather with this tool.

Discover, Plan, Enjoy your travel with #Triptomatic #traveltuesday Click To Tweet

Triptomatic – Discover, Plan, Enjoy your travel. An amazing tool specially for searching for and finding activities or attractions in any destination, an amazing feature. This app collects data about local attractions so you can discover them easily on the app’s map instead of browsing through book guides or other sites. Or why not try….

Localscope – You wanna learn about a new destination, or local spot, whats the word on the streets, yelp reviews, what factors determine your choice? Location, location, location…!

Localscope as your travel planning tool, will sort all that out by collecting geo-tagged information from social networks e.g. YouTube videos, Instagram images, more than a dozen search engines and other apps. Localscope uses Google maps to show you the exact location. You’ll be able to read yelp reviews etc. You could even add geo-tagged reminders for your next visit. Amazingly we used it to ping us a reminder to our best Pizza bar in Rome, in our opinion anyway.

You could even add geo-tagged reminders for your next visit. #Localscope #traveltips Click To Tweet

Foursquare – You can find your best brand gym, bar, coffee shop, restaurants and a heck of a lot more with this tool. So it’s a staple on our PCs.

Agoda – Looking for cheap value hotels esp. in Asia. This should be one of your best travel planning tools.

Airbnb – This travel planning tool helps you find accommodation anywhere in the world, you shouldn’t plan your trip before you try it, if you have no clue where you’ll stay. It gives you access maps to neighbourhoods across London, Berlin, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro, Washington D.C. and much more!

So don’t be that person that needs a vacation from a vacation…use these travel planning tools to stay ahead of the game and travel like a Pro Digital Nomad 🙂 TWEET THIS NOW 🙂 

don't be that person that needs a vacation from a vacation #travelplanning Click To Tweet

If this grabs your attention OR it’s your first visit Subscribe to our blog Today and receive amazing travel tips, deals and access to an amazing travel app.  

We’re sure we’ve a few travel planning tools yet to discover or even use on this humongous list. So we will be updating it quite often, why not bookmark it for quick reference. And we know you too have a few tools or apps we know nought about, so why not tell us your version of what travel planning tools and resources that make your journeys so much more fun? What tips do you have for first time travellers? Do share below!

By the way every image  and text is socially shareable too, simply highlight and you can share away!   Try It Now…

After you’ve left a comment, let’s CONNECT and bond some more on Facebook or on Twitter,  Instagram and Google. We also Podcast on iTunes and you’ll definitely want to check out our amazingly helpful Travel Club to help you plan your next life changing 5 Star trip like a VIP.

See, Do, and Be more!

Julie Syl Kalungi

Email: support[at]Juleskalpauli.com

Need Help with your Bucket List Or Question on a Destination? Check out our Travel Club Tab where we Help People Everyday. Want to work with or advertise with us, Check out our Media Kit or Contact us!