Effective ways to save money by preparing for your trip with the right travel-related apps How to prepare for a road trip with your iPhone There’s no getting around it. You’ve got to take a road trip—a drive up a mountain or over a bridge over a wide expanse of water—on your iPhone. We know. It’s a bit of a pain to pull out your phone for the 20 minutes (sometimes more than an hour) needed to download Maps, take a photo, and get directions. But, hey, it’s a great way to see something new, and to explore the world without ever coming face to face with a dead animal or two. For those who care about good road trip karma, we wanted to take a look at the five must-haves here. 1. A GPS for the roads If you live in the United States, you will soon have a car and a phone that let you take the best of both worlds (or at least the best and some of the worst). But what if your driving aspirations extend even further? You want a way to get directions from one part of the country to another. Well, you can still download Google Maps or Waze for your phone, but here’s the catch: these apps use cell service as opposed to GPS. And, while driving directions from one place to another are great for those who can do them on their phones, it turns out they just don’t happen that often. That’s where GPS comes in. You don’t want to drive into oncoming traffic or the other guy, after all. That’s why GPS can help you get from point A to point B in more-or-less real time. 2. Maps All of this is pretty easy on a computer or laptop, but it’s not so easy on an iPhone or Android device. Sure, GPS navigation is better, especially if you’re used to them, because you know where you are and where you’re going. But for those of us with an iPhone or Android device, we need a little help. Maps apps are a great way to use GPS, but they generally provide more driving directions than they do driving directions. So why do we keep coming back to Google Maps? Because Google Maps has been updated over the years. It’s pretty good, but it’s better at covering more areas than Google Maps, and it is the only app in the country that links you to other providers like maps.in.in or Yatra. Now, you can also do maps by entering your destination address and a PIN for your account’s pin, or simply using a pre-filled address. The result is a great combination of driving directions and navigation. 3. Maps Navigation When traveling by car, you don’t really need to know where you’re going. You just know where you are in case you need directions. That’s pretty boring, so a navigation app can help you get there faster. However, it can be even easier for that once-a-time road trip to drive more than a couple of hours. Because a mapping app gives you a quick look at nearby places, it can give directions without ever actually driving to the places you need to get there. With Google Maps Navigation, for example, you can see maps for a large number of destinations when you’re on the go. You can also use the trip planner to know which parts of the city you should be driving through, or to plan your trip to your next appointment. That’s basically where apps like Waze come into play—they’re good for being your travel companion, as they tell you what roads were safe for cars to be on—so you can be less concerned with finding a parking spot after the lights turn green. 4. Yelp Do you use Yelp? Do you search for a place nearby before and after you go there to make sure the food is as good as you expected? Do you use it to check where you should try to eat while you’re in town? Chances are you use Yelp to at least one part of your trip. What do we know about them? According to a Pew Research Center survey of almost 18,000 U.S. internet users, 56 percent of them use Yelp for recommendations. Yelp has the second spot in most popular online sources of restaurant reviews, but it doesn’t even crack the third on top sources of online user reviews for restaurants in the US. But it comes out on top all the time, and it appears that, if you do a lot of research on restaurants, you’ll never have much trouble finding a good one. 5. Waze You can probably understand why so many people use Waze. It provides real-time traffic, bike paths, road closures, and speed traps. It’s got pretty good navigation too—though it’s probably not a huge stretch to call it driving directions compared to the GPS apps we just mentioned. Waze does let you know when gas stations, restaurants, or hotels offer promotions—it even provides the address and contact information for them in case you don’t want to look them up. You can add location to places you’re going to or looking to go somewhere while you wait for a ride, or you can plan your entire course without ever driving to it. Waze’s simple app makes it easy to take the most important part of driving—finding the right place to go—out of the picture. It’s also a good way to get a general sense of places around you, since, after all, if you’re the guy who wants to eat at Denny’s at 9 every night, Waze lets you know what the current restaurant nearby is like. What’s in a name? But isn’t Waze like, oh, I’m not going to go and live in New York, so it wouldn’t have any sense of that? Isn’t it like a friend of yours who you know won’t stay with you when you move from Dallas to Los Angeles? It’s actually pretty good at predicting where people are going to be living. It’s a pretty amazing application of predictive analytics. Waze’s user base is younger, slightly, than other services, and the data they’re using is also more accurate and more updated than Google Maps’. Waze also makes it easy to see your driving direction as you are on the road. What can you use Waze for? What are you using Waze for? Tell us in the comments below! You can use it for all kinds of things: planning a trip, following the road, finding a restaurant, finding directions or driving directions, finding the best parking spot, checking in at a hotel, finding an airline, keeping tabs on what’s going on in your neighborhood, etc. It can be your own personal GPS app you install on your phone or your personal GPS with Waze which would integrate things like your favorite websites and Twitter updates into your driving directions, it can even become your personal navigation app. There are a ton of possibilities, and there is so much to do with Waze that it can be one of the “most fun” apps on the iPhone. But of course, to use it effectively, you need to install it and become its member so that you can get the best out of it. Share this post with a friend!
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