3 apps for business travellers

15 Jul 3 apps for business travellers

Can you believe that once upon a time there were no iPhones? How did we survive?! Technology has come a long way over the years and there are many brilliant apps out there to keep your business travels organised. These are just three of our favourites.

TripCase

If you organise a lot of events in Europe and overseas, TripCase is a super useful travel app. It allows you to keep track of all your travel details and flight information, which is much easier than rummaging around in your bag for printed documents. All you need to do is make sure you keep your phone charged!

Features

• Itinerary manager
• Real-time flight status
• Flight alerts and reminders
• Share travel itineraries with colleagues
• Available as a desktop app as well as on a smartphone
• Download from iTunes and Google Play

 

Price: Free

 

Using TripCase on a desktop browser

Our road test

Signing up is easy and you can link it to your Google or Facebook account. Once you verify your email address you can begin creating your trip on your desktop browser or your phone.

Using the app on our smartphones, we really like the user experience and simple design. Surprisingly for a free app, there aren’t any adverts!

Simply log all your travel details including your flights, train, car rental booking details, accommodation and any activities you have pre-planned.

Log business meeting details

TripCase is definitely designed with frequent business travellers, personal assistants and events planners in mind. In particular it has the ability to log information about meetings and restaurant bookings.

Other travel apps we have tested (including the popular WorldMate) are geared more towards holidaymakers. These work OK to an extent but they render useless for logging those important business details.

Completely fuss-free

The real selling point of this app is its serious simplicity. It’s not cluttered, there are no bright colours or frustrating third party content.

We love that it is sympathetic to tired eyes with a plain black and white colour scheme. It’s just a straightforward tool to allow building a travel itinerary easy as pie.

All your booking codes in one place

The horror of travelling is forgetting all those printed out booking confirmation emails and reservation numbers, and not having a clue what time to catch your train or flight mid-way through your journey.

Solving this problem, TripCase acts like a neatly designed travel file but without the paper.

Should you wish to have a hard copy of your journey, the app allows you to print everything in one document.

Real time flights

This feature is pretty cool. Simply add in your airline provider and flight number and TripCase will pull through all the information. It even tells you if the flight is late or on time.

Connecting with colleagues

Those travelling as part of a group with colleagues can connect TripCase itineraries. This is useful if you are all on the same trip but only one of you has added the travel details.

TripCase options including sharing and combining trips (screenshot from the desktop)

Additional features

• Linking trips – if you’re super organised you can also link your trip with a booking by adding in a reservation code from a TripCase-connected travel partner. (Annoyingly we couldn’t find who these are when we searched TripCase’s website).

• Contacts – keeping things streamlined, one of the only other additional features in TripCase is the ability to add and import contacts. At first it seems a little unnecessary to double up your contacts list. We realised this could be used to remind yourself of who’s coming on your trip. You may want to add the phone number of a city guide or translator here too – saving the hassle of scrolling frantically through your entire address book.

• Split trips – some trips aren’t straightforward, which this app accounts for. On the desktop app, you can split trips.

 

Any.do

The to do list app with 10 million downloads to date, we really like Any.do as a way to manage travel and work tasks.

Features

• Simple and intuitive design
• Add sub tasks, reminders, file in categories, add notes
• Available as a desktop app as well as on a smartphone
• Sync across devices
• ‘Moment’ feature acts as a daily planner
• Sync with Cal (calendar app)
• Upgrade to the paid version for location based reminders such as when arriving at a supermarket, share tasks with colleagues, set recurring tasks, attach up to 100MB of files (including video, PDF and audio)
• Download from iTunes and Google Play

 

Price

• Free version available
• Paid version from $2.99 per month

 

Any.do home screen on a desktop internet browser

Our road test

Trialling Any.do we have found this app to be much less painful than some note applications. Having used Evernote in the past, we were keen to find a task managing app without some of the fuss and frills. Whilst Evernote may be great for some, we personally felt there were too many ‘scrapbooking’ features making it similar to a journal or diary.

Back to basics

We like that Any.do lets you create tasks without asking for too much information. You can then add sub tasks and notes but it’s designed quite smartly so that you don’t get lost in tasks inception.

Keeping work tasks separate

Often we might set out to use a task app with the intention of only using it for work but inevitably we might want to add a reminder to pick up mum’s birthday card. The app has four sections so you can easily switch between work, personal, shopping and everything-lumped-into-one.

Best for upgrading to pro

After a day or two using the free version of Any.do, it does begin to get annoying to receive so many notifications from the app on your phone. As you can’t set a due date for any task in free mode, you have to constantly dismiss notifications.

‘Moments’ are an overview of your to-do list in Any.do but you only get 6 free uses before you need to pay. This sadly makes the free version rather useless unless you are happy to only keep track of what you need to do day-by-day.

If you’re happy to pay $2.99 it’s a well-designed app.

Citymapper

The ‘ultimate transport app’ for cities all over the world including London, Manchester, Birmingham, Paris, Berlin, New York, Barcelona, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

Features

• Journey planner which uses all the transport modes to find you the best route
• All in real time including bus and train times and disruptions
• Offline tub map and tube times
• Download from iTunes and Google Play

 

Not just for the native Londoner, this app is great if you organise or travel to events and meetings in the capital. Have a business event happening in Paris? You’ll have no trouble finding your way around with Citymapper.

Price: Free

One thing we like is you don’t have to create an account to use the app. This is great if you download this on-the-go and don’t have the patience to drum up a new password and verify your email address.

The app is very clever and once you open it up, it detects your location suggesting cities near you that you might want to navigate through.

Citymapper can also be used from any internet browser, perfect if you’re in the office and want to plan your business trip on your desktop. It doesn’t need any login at this stage either!

Things Citymapper is useful for

• Finding your way through a city you don’t know
• Finding your way through a city you do know, but you’re useless with transport
• Finding the fastest route to your desired destination
• Giving your colleagues or friends directions to where you want to meet them
• Folks that don’t have the best instinctive sense of direction
• The daily city commute
• Travelling to business meetings, site visits, corporate events

 

Mapping out your route

We still haven’t had to create an account yet, and we’re able to use the awesome functionality of Citymapper.

For our test we tried mapping out a route in Central London. Say you want to get from ZSL London Zoo to The British Museum as shown above, it brings you several options.

We love the practical information provided for each transport method. Citymapper compares your options for walking, cycling and taxi to your destination.

You’re given the number of calories you could burn, and how much it will cost you. They also let you know where to find nearby cycle hire. Nice work Citymapper encouraging a healthy lifestyle 🙂

Navigating public transport

Even city people get lost on the tube. This app makes it so easy to work out the fastest route and how much it’s going to cost to get to your desired destination.

Times and location of tube stations and bus stops are provided. It also tells you how long you have until the next tube or bus in real time. We like the super cool details such as which is the best section to hop on the tube carriage for a particular journey.

Intuitive design

Using Citymapper on a smartphone, the app has a great design. The maps are intuitive and you can bring up more information by swiping up or down.

We can’t think of any way they could improve the look and feel of it!

Finding local places to eat

If you want to find something to eat during your travels or on-route to a meeting, you can search for places to dine nearby. Great for those who are in a city they don’t know well or you want some inspiration.

Meeting colleagues

Send your colleagues directions by using the ‘Meet Me Here’ option. It’s handy if you are both meeting a client for lunch and need to travel separately.

 

What’s your favourite?

These are our top 3 we’ve tested this month. Have you tried any of these apps? What’s your favourite app when you’re travelling on business? Let us know by leaving a comment!