10 years ago you could spot tourists on the street by their heavy usages of
maps. Today this is nearly gone. Most tourists use their phone to find their
way around a city. This is only one of the many things that changed since the
start of the digital revolution.
This year I travelled around Australia and used
my mobile phone quiet a lot to find the best places to eat, sleep and visit. Here I
will go through everything I did to make my vacation as great as possible.
Kayak
Most people only know Kayak as a search engine for cheap
flights, hotels and car rentals. I used it for all of the above, but also as a
travel assistant. You can sent all emails with booking confirmations to a
special email address and then kayak will create a nice calender for you with
all the details. This comes in handy if you plan a long trip with lots of
stops.
Hy-Travel
This is a great service I found a couple of weeks before
flying to Australia. A whatsapp based service that tries to give you tips for
your vacation. And the people behind this service gave me lots of interesting
ideas. I did almost all of them. If you need some inspiration for your
vacation, just ping them!
Get a VPN
Travelling means that you will login using lots of free wifis in cafés or
restaurants. And this could be really dangerous. Get a VPN. For example
ZenMate or Hide My Ass.
AirBnB
Use AirBnB...or couchsurfing.
It is not only cheaper than a hotel, but the more important thing: you can
choose to stay somewhere with someone that lives in the city/place you are
going to. They will have tips what to do and where to go. This will make
the difference from experiencing only the touristy things and diving into
the city and seeing it as the people living there.
Get a SIM card
If you don't want to receive a huge phone bill because of insane roaming
charges, the only escape is to get a local Prepaid SIM card for the country
you are visiting. This wiki
has a extensive list.
Master the public transport system
Most cities have a kinda usable public transportation system. Google Maps can
help you finding a route in lots of cities, but I found it really practical to
have a map of the train system with me. My solution is to download the maps as
PDF and adding them to my dropbox. Luckily the app has an option to mark files
as offline viewable. A list of links to cities I visited can be found in my
del.icio.us account.
Maps maps maps
Relying on maps on your phone can be problematic. If you loose the phone reception,
you loose your orientation in the city. But there is a solution. Google maps offers
to download the current visible area to your phone. Sadly it will not allow routing
or searching while you are offline. For that you can install here.com.
Within here it is easy to download a whole continent and have a working routing
on your phone without any phone reception.
Places to go
If you don't only want to rely on the information of your AirBnB hosts,
finding a good restaurant or thing to see/do can be kinda hard. You can
start by reading wikitravel and
get a rough idea about the city. The next step would be to find out what
location rating app is used in the city you are in. This highly differs from
country to country. Ask people what they use. The most common choices in
the western world are TripAdvisor, FourSquare
and Yelp. But be smart. Places with only 3-5 ratings
and all 5 stars might not be as good as they look like.
Other apps
There is a whole bunch of apps that try to make your trip as enjoyable
as possible. I will list a few here:
Google Translate - Don't understand the language? This is your rescue!
Amazon Instant Video - Download a few movies onto your phone/iPad for the
boring waiting time during layovers at the airport.
App of the airline you are flying with - Notifications, early check in, seat
reservations. Just do it all. You want to have a pleasant flight without
surprises, right 
?
Currency calculator - Get a little currency calculator app. I used
this.
Helps you in your first few days till you get a feeling for the value of
things.