If your business involves any kind of travel whatsoever, you need a good travel app.
There are plenty to choose from, but the best ones usually cost a buck or three.
Kayak Pro for iOS, for example, normally sells for 99 cents, but for a limited time you can grab it free of charge. (Just click the blue Get It button and you’ll land at the iTunes download page. Or you can download it directly on your iPhone or iPad.)
The app lets you accomplish a lot of travel-related tasks without going anywhere near your computer. You can search for flights, car rentals, and hotels and compare deals, and you can even book a hotel room right from the app — handy for those times when you suddenly discover you need to extend your stay while on a business trip.
Kayak also provides flight status information, which is great when you’re getting ready to leave for the airport and want to make sure your flight is still departing at the scheduled time.
Other perks include airport and airline phone numbers and information, baggage-fee lookups, price-change alerts, packing lists, a currency converter, and terminal maps for over 100 airports.
My favorite feature, however, is Kayak’s TripIt-like itinerary management: You can forward your booking confirmation emails to trips@kayak.com, then access and review your itineraries right inside the app.
In other words, if there’s a more comprehensive travel app, I haven’t found it. Kayak Pro is currently for iOS only; there’s a non-Pro Android version as well, which is free but ad-supported. (It lacks the terminal maps but has pretty much everything else.)
Have you found a travel app you like better? If so, tell me about it in the comments.
