Love of Travel
All my life I’ve loved to travel — whether it’s an 18-hour road trip to Colorado, a week-long conference in San Francisco, or the adventure of a lifetime in Eastern Europe. In our technology-dependent world, travel will either be much easier or a much bigger pain depending on how well you plan a few important details.
While it may seem like a no-brainer, the biggest and most important travel tech tip I can give is to take a portable charger with you. You may even want to take two. Airport terminals often don’t have wall outlets, but if they do, they aren’t always guaranteed to work or may already be occupied. On a similar note, consider packing two charging cables. When I travelled to Belgrade, Serbia, my original lightning cable for my iPhone shorted and would not charge my phone. By luck, I was able to stumble upon a store that sold a lightning cable so I could charge my phone. However, it took several hours of searching before that happened.
Essential Apps
A less well-known tip I like to share is to Google your flight. By simply Googling your flight number (e.g. Aer Lingus 6107), Google will give you detailed information including your arriving and departing gates and terminals, along with estimated times. This is super beneficial for international flights, as you may be without 4G LTE once you land in Europe, or wherever you are traveling.
I also highly recommend downloading your flight operator’s official app to store your boarding pass. For those who prefer to receive your boarding pass via email, I always highly recommend to save your boarding pass as a PDF on your phone using an application from the App Store. While it may not be needed, having a backup copy is always super helpful in tight or stressful situations.
International Travel
Last but certainly not least for those travelling by air, if you’re flying internationally out of the U.S., always check what kind of travel adapter you need. When traveling to a couple tech and gaming conferences outside of the U.S., I’ve been surprised by the amount of people who forget to bring a travel adapter. I bought mine on Amazon for $12.99, which is much less expensive than they tend to be at your final destination.
Road tripping instead of flying? A hidden gem I found is an app named GasBuddy, which is almost an essential. GasBuddy is a simple-to-use app, which shows you all the gas prices in any given area. This information can help you budget more effectively.
Aaron Whitfield is the CEO of PocketFullOfApps.com and a Senior Writer with Innovation & Tech Today. He is based in the Midwest and can be emailed at admin@pocketfullofapps.com or contacted via his website aaronwhitfield.me
By Aaron Whitfield
