That’s a lot of questions. Well, thankfully there are a lot of apps out there designed to help.
Here are five of the best travel apps to make booking work trips a breeze.
1. KAYAK
There’s a good chance you’ve heard of KAYAK. It’s one of the big names in travel tools and belongs to the giant that is Booking.com.
But maybe you’ve never fully explored its potential.
KAYAK has a handy app for mobile that lets you search flights quickly and easily. One of the things we like about it is the quick-sort buttons at the top of search results: choose from Best, Cheapest, Quickest or Earliest. (Can’t anything in life be all four?)
Another handy feature is the Fee Assistant. Select your payment method and number of bags, and it’ll update the flight prices to include any extra baggage fees and credit card charges. That way you can search by the actual price.
KAYAK’s app also lets you manage itineraries. You just forward all your booking confirmations to an email address and KAYAK aggregates them. That way both the travel manager and travelling staff members can see all the details in one place.
KAYAK is free on iOS, Android, and web.
2. Hopper
If you’re on a tight budget, Hopper is the tool for you.
For starters, Hopper has a price prediction feature that tells you whether waiting to purchase a flight will end up saving you money or costing you extra.
You can also set it up to notify you of price changes or deals.
Another neat thing is the design: Hopper gives you results colour-coded by price bracket, so you can see at a glance which dates are the cheapest to fly on.
Hopper say that their price forecasts are 95% accurate up to a year in advance, and that customers save $50 per ticket on average – a small saving that could add up to big dollars if your staff travel regularly.
Another bonus? It also works for booking hotels.
Hopper is free on iOS on Android.
3. Rydoo
Apps for finding cheap flights are great, but they don’t necessarily cover all your business needs. (After all, you’re managing staff trips, not booking your own dream holiday. Sigh.)
Maybe features like 24/7 support or travel expense tracking are more of a priority.
Enter Rydoo, which is an end-to-end solution for business travel. You can use it to find and book flights, sure, but you can also use it to make group bookings, keep itineraries, and track expenses (staff can take snaps of their receipts and the app will use OCR to do the rest).
It also integrates with a bunch of other applications like Dropbox, SAP, Oracle – even Uber and Lyft so you can easily track business rides.
Rydoo isn’t free, but it isn’t outrageously priced either. You can find the latest price plans here.
4. AHOY
Checking in is a drag, isn’t it? Having to enter passport numbers (yet again) and select seat preferences, etc…
AHOY, a new entry into the travel app market, bypasses all of that by getting you to enter everything in just once – and then using the saved data to automatically check travellers in and send the boarding passes to their phones.
If you’re managing trips for multiple staff this centralisation of data can be a godsend.
It also has a 24/7 flight concierge and lets you book ultra-last minute flights up to one hour before take-off.
AHOY is currently free and available on iOS and Android.
5. Skyscanner
Skyscanner is your classic travel-booking app.
If you’re keen for something that’s all about finding the best flights, hotels and car rentals, then you need not look much further: Skyscanner sticks to what it does best and doesn’t complicate things with extra bells and whistles.
One of Skyscanner’s strengths is its wide variety of filters. Refine your search by choosing flight times, durations, stops, airports, airlines and class in order to drill it down to the best option for your needs.
If you have some flexibility on dates, calendar and chart views will help you narrow down the most economical times to fly.
Skyscanner may not be an all-in-one travel planning and itinerary app, but it does its job well – and with 70 million+ users, it’s popular for a reason.
