Best Road Trip Planner: Top 10 Travel Apps for Road Trips
Best Road Trip Planner: Top 10 Travel Apps for Road Trips
Planning for an upcoming road trip is not the same as planning for other types of travel. There are numerous things that can make trouble during your trip. You may experience bad weather, unexpected detours, or a car breakdown that will prevent you from getting to your travel destination on time. This is why you should consider using the best road trip planner apps and websites and avoid these issues as much as possible.
Fortunately, there are numerous iOS and Android apps available today that can help us handle plan everything for our trips, such as traffic navigation, planning road routes, hotel bookings, as well as finding interesting attractions, the cheapest fuel stops, and places to eat along the way. The road planner apps listed below will help you plan ahead everything needed for your next road trip and have a hassle-free experience.
Waze is one of the largest community-based navigation and traffic apps in the world that allows you to join other drivers (Waze users) near you who share road and traffic information in real time, which can help you save gas money and time when traveling. You can get a lot of helpful info via this application, such as the location of potholes, police speed traps, accidents, and hazards on the road you are driving. It also lets you see the speeds at which other vehicles travel in congestion. Waze is particularly popular among car service and taxi drivers in cities, but it is very helpful on highways alike. Not only does it act as a crowd-sourced traffic planner, but it also serves as a navigation travel app that shows turn-by-turn directions for the particular traffic conditions.All of this make Waze the best road trip planner app by many.
This app is free of charge and available for both Android, iOS devices. Note: Waze needs information about your location all the time during a trip, which will be draining your phone battery.
This app used to be designed only for vehicles with connected dashboard displays with a goal to facilitate the use of phone and apps services while driving. Android Auto has experienced some big updates in the recent years that make it simplified yet more advanced. In fact, you can now use its voice actions and interface on either your car display or phone screen. Thanks to its easy-to-use interface, larger touch targets, and responsive voice commands, you will be able to stay more focused and minimize distraction while on the road.
Android Auto is compatible with Play Music, Google Maps, and a lot of other applications so that you can use it to control music playback, navigate, send quick replies, and answer your phone. Note that this road trip planner app is only available for Android phones, as well as that you need an aftermarket stereo or Auto compatible vehicle to use in your car.
iExit is an app that helps you find available services at the highway exits in your vicinity by using your location. This smart app will point at the important exits on your route, including rest areas, gas stations, restaurants, and hotels. By displaying pics of amenities and businesses at upcoming highway exits, iExit helps you plan ahead your next pitstops. Just mark a particular restaurant or another service as a favorite interstate exit, and this app will tell you in a timely manner when this place is coming up on your route.
You can search for specific display locations and businesses on a handy on-screen map and check out gas prices, as well as find amenities like campgrounds, truck parking, or Wi-Fi. Additionally, you can utilize this application to withdraw money from an upcoming ATM, grab a bite to eat, or when you need to go to a toilet. There are iExit app versions available for both Android and iOS mobile devices.
Field Trip is an app developed by Google that searches for the sites of interest in your area based on your location and selected categories. When you get close to an attractive site on your route, this app displays pop-up cards on your phone with interesting facts about that place. No click is required! Alternatively, Field Trip can alert you on time and read the info relevant to a particular location, which requires a Bluetooth audio device or headset connected to your phone.
In addition, this Google trip application taps into a variety of recommendations from trendsetting and travel publications, such as Zagat, Thrillist, Sunset, Cool Hunting, TimeOut, and Eater. This way you can discover the hidden gems, best places to eat, drink or shop in an area, learn more about a local history, and have a lot of fun.
Note: Field Trip is only optimized for smartphones; it is not available for tablets.
You will need to refuel your car several times during the long road trips, so finding a reliable gas station and low-priced gasoline is very important. This is where GasBuddy comes in! In a nutshell, this community-based fuel application helps people track down inexpensive nearby gas stations based on their current location. The users have the opportunity to update the gas prices in a particular area and earn reward points for reporting the real-time gas prices. You can take advantage of those points to participate in the raffles and win 100 dollars in free gas or other valuable prizes.
Besides gas stations, this mobile app also provides information about neighbor charging stations for electric cars. While many of the road trip apps on the web are designed for Android and iOS only, GasBuddy works on Windows Phone and BlackBerry as well. It makes it the best road trip planner app for discovering the local tourist attractions.
TollSmart is an app that helps you calculate tolls costs all the way you travel – across all toll roads, bridges, and tunnels in the United States and Canada. It factors in the most affordable transponder discounts from more than fifty tolling agencies, including SunPass, E-ZPass, FasTrak, I-PASS, and TxTag. Note that it only supports transponder-based systems in North America. How to use it? It’s quite simple. Just get into the TollTracker system and log in the toll rates for cost report logging. Once you purchase in-app, you get the access to all the tolls for a diverse range of proposed routes.
This smart app supports all types of vehicles, ranging from tiny motorcycles to big trucks. That means you can use it for small passenger cars, family sedans, wagons, SUVs, and large nine-axle vehicles. TollSmart is available for both Android and iOS phones.
Roadtrippers is another fantastic trip planner tool that supports users on either its official website or via iOS and Android mobile apps. You can easily plot out your course through this application and see all the important things along the way, including historical stops, museums, offbeat attractions, hotels, shops, camp sites, amusement parks, restaurants, and dining options. That helps you a lot to determinate what you wish to be pulled up on your route as well as to plan out ahead an upcoming trip. Besides, you can use the Roadtrippers mobile app to take all the data and information from the website that are relevant to your trip. Once you have saved them on your phone, you’ll be able to use that info on the road during your travel. It has been rated as the best road trip planner app for route drawing.
How to use it? Enter your final destination and starting location, date of travel, as well as what kind of things you want to find along the way. Roadtrippers app will then plot the most suitable route for you. Add all the important sites you come across during your trip, and this app will draw another travel map accordingly.
Gogobot is an application intended for trip planning that shows you off places to visit, stay, play, and eat on your route. This social travel app has a large Gogobot’s community consisting of people from all around the world. The users upload information, photographs, and ratings for the sites. They can also tag them based on diverse interests, such as budget, foodie, family, adventure, local, and outdoor. These photos and info can help you get a better idea of what you may discover at the certain places. You can explore different areas through this app before hitting the road and make a list of places to visit.
This trip application tells you the rest stops on a route by states and highways, so you can plan ahead the places to rest along the way. Aside from displaying traditional rest stops, USA Rest Stop Locator also tells you which places offer the best amenities, as well as how much is left to the upcoming location. It’s free for Android.
The Maps.Me is a mobile application that allows you to browse the remote places worldwide. When spotting something interesting, simply zoom in on that city or region and find out more about it. You can also download a map of a certain city/area with or without drawn directions and use it offline when needed during your journey. That’s why Maps.Me is one of the best road trip planner apps for those looking for a high level of detail on road maps.
In addition to these ten best road trip planner apps, there is also a wide range of flight scanner sites geared towards people searching for the best and most affordable flights. If you plan traveling by air, be sure to consider these sites and find the best deals for the price all around the globe.