Travel apps for every step you take
By Meg Rivera
WHERE in the world are you traveling to? Summertime is the perfect opportunity to bust out your backpack and get lost somewhere. I’m on Twitter quite a lot, and every other tweet is about someone’s trip to Camotes or to Boracay. Even Japan is becoming a hot destination, especially with all of the cheap sales available these days. Have you ever had goosebumps looking at a photo of a bowl of ramen? It comes with a cold side of envy, let me tell you that.
Part of the traveling, as Instagrammers will know, is the documentation. Once you come back to Cebu, all you have are the memories and the stories to bring back. It seemed incredible to you when you were there, but to the rest of us it just sounds like another narrative. Bring those travel memories back to life with these three travel diary apps, and you can take all of your followers along with you for the ride, every single step of the way.
App name: Trip Journal
App developer: iQapps
Available on: iTunes, Google Play
Easy to use: Trip Journal was awarded $100,000 from Google as the best Best Travel Application. It is touted as the best app to track, record and document every single step of your trip. I love how it integrates with social media such as Facebook and Instagram to make sure your followers never lose touch.
Overall comment: Is there anything this app won’t do? This allows you to record everything that you do on your trip. The geotagging function is hooked up to Google Earth, so you can show on a map where you’ve been and where you will be going. You can also take lots of photos and add notes to the photos about the locations you’ve visited. It also has one of the most accurate GPS tracking apps, so you can show everyone that little street cafe where you had the most incredible hot chocolate. Five clicks out of five.
App name: Vacation and Travel Journal
App developer: Major Forms
Available on: iTunes, Google Play
Easy to use: This one is calibrated a little bit more towards hikers and trekkers. When you create an event that you want to document the app immediately tracks your longitude, altitude, time and date, etc. I can’t imagine wanting to use this if I was vacationing in a city, but I sure as heck want to know if I were on top of Osmeña Peak!
Overall comment: I think this would be too difficult for the standard traveler to use. It records a lot of information that you simply don’t need. It’s a different story if I were a mountaineer though. I think this is wonderful for documenting your climbs so you know how to prepare for future ones. And it sure beats just telling everyone that you scaled a big ass hill. Four clicks out of five.
App name: Travel Diary
App developer: e250 Apps
Available on: iTunes, Google Play
Easy to use: Think of this as a private diary. It functions the same way as Facebook, except that the posts are stored on your phone. You can organise the posts according to where you’ve been, so you can create several entries for the same city or country.
Overall comment: I think the best part of this app is that you can’t share your posts on social media. Sure, it means you have to copy/paste all of your entries to Facebook but it keeps your travel experience special. It also means that any drunken nights out in Pattaya stay strictly within the confines of your SD card. A thousand bonus points, in any case. Four clicks out of five.
