Travel is easier than it has ever been before, for a single (yet sprawling) reason: the internet.
Pre-internet backpacking was a game of waiting hours for transport, knocking on hostel doors in search of a vacant bed, and hoping that someone nearby could speak your mother tongue. If you ran out of cash or travellers cheques you were in strife. If you found yourself driving a car, you had to decipher a road atlas. And if you wanted to be entertained on a 15-hour train ride, you’d better have packed some (very heavy) books.
Today all these problems can be solved in seconds if you have access to the right smartphone apps.
But with literal millions of options available, which deserve your download? If you ask us, the following 10 are the best of the best.
1. Momondo
You’ve probably heard of Skyscanner or Google Flights: tools that allow you to pop in an origin, a destination and a date, before serving up every possible flight from every carrier via every route. But if you ask us, Momondo is the best flight aggregator of the lot.
A smooth user interface makes it easy to identify the most enticing flights (Momondo highlight the ‘Cheapest’, ‘Quickest’ and ‘Best’ options), the app’s independence means that every major carrier is shown, and travellers with flexible itineraries can find the cheapest flights and destinations at a glance.
Our hot tip: once you’ve found your ideal flight, it’s always wise to compare the cheapest option on Momondo, which is usually provided by a third-party agent, with the price of booking direct with the airline. Even if booking direct is a bit more expensive, it can make solving issues far easier.
2. Rome2Rio
What if you don’t necessarily need to fly from one place to another? Rome2Rio is the ultimate journey planner, covering planes, trains, buses, ferries and car hire.
A company founded by Aussies but used by the world, you simply plug in your departure point and your destination, whether a city, a landmark or a specific address, and are served a complete list of travel options covering rail, road, water and air. You can then follow the links to book your tickets, your car hire and even your hotel.
3. Hostelworld
The world’s biggest hostel marketplace is the appropriately named Hostelworld – a booking site that features 16,500 hostels spread across almost every country on earth, and over 13 million reviews from travellers just like you.
Because Hostelworld focuses purely on budget accommodation, accommodation providers will often have lower prices here than they will on other platforms, like Airbnb and Booking.com, as they know that offering great value is the key to standing out.
In recent years Hostelworld has also recognised that they could offer a more complete experience to their users, by bringing them together before they arrive at their next hostel. The Hostelworld app now offers hostel- and city-specific chat rooms where backpackers can mix and mingle, as well as direct messaging for when you find someone you really click with!
4. WikiCamps
It’s fair to say that camping is the most budget accommodation of all. It also gives you the opportunity to enjoy the unique ecology and natural beauty of a destination; you trade the hustle and bustle for a more raw and relaxed backpacking experience.
Australia is a wide brown land that has more than its fair share of national parks and camping spots. WikiCamps is an app that has been designed to bring all these camping options, from private caravan parks to public lands, together in one place. And it does it extremely well.
Use a wealth of filters – price, utilities, accessibility, pet-friendliness – to target your search, hit the ‘Site List’ button to see nearby options, plan your route with Google and Apple Maps integration, and enjoy a lot of this functionality even when you’re offline!
5. Maps.me
Google Maps might be the world’s go-to navigation app, but we think there’s one map tool that outdoes Google in a couple of key backpacking areas.
Maps.me uses data from the Open Streets Map Project, a crowd-sourced map database that allows users to add their own landmarks and routes. This means that Maps.me offers a wealth of secret spots and hiking trails that don’t feature on Google Maps. If you love exploring and finding those cool things that other travellers tend to miss, this tool is invaluable.
The other key feature of Maps.me is its offline capability. Sure, you can download and use Google Maps offline, but you need to think ahead and follow a number of steps to do so. In Maps.me, on the other hand, every map is an offline map. The tool exclusively uses downloaded maps. Because everything is saved to your device, it no longer matters whether you’re connected to the internet – your GPS will work anywhere, so you can safely navigate your way to your destination without needing to be online.
6. XE currency converter
You didn’t embark on a backpacking adventure to do maths. Converting currency is at best annoying, and at worst actively confusing – you’re often met with odd ratios, like 17 pesos to the dollar, which can make quick mental maths a challenge. And if you’re travelling across multiple countries in a short period of time, you might move on from a currency just as you get used to it.
The XE currency converter is designed to take all those worries away. It allows you to load in as many currencies as you want, and gives you a live rate across all of them. Simply click on the currency you want to check, type in the amount, and the app will instantly serve up the value across all your nominated currencies.
This tool also works offline – it will just use the conversion rate from the last time you opened the app while connected to the internet (which won’t usually be an issue.)
7. Wise
Where once a backpacker had to carefully guard their cash and travellers cheques, or had to get someone from home to push through a Western Union transfer in times of trouble, getting money from one country to another can now be done super cheaply and in a couple of quick clicks.
While the XE currency converter offers its own transfer tool, we prefer to use Wise, for one simple reason: it offers better conversion rates. Wise use what’s called the ‘mid-market rate’ to calculate their transfer conversions, which is the rate that financial institutions offer each other when they conduct an international transfer. Almost all other transfer apps, including XE, use the foreign exchange rate, which is generally worse.
While it should be said that XE offers lower fees than Wise, and is usually better for particularly large transfers, Wise is best for the amounts that backpackers usually find themselves sending.
8. Google Translate
If you’re reading this article we’ll assume that you have a good handle on English. You might have a few other languages under your belt too. But you’ll never know all the languages, no matter how hard you try. Thankfully Google does.
If you find yourself in a country with a language you don’t speak, Google Translate could be the most important tool on your phone. Able to translate over 100 of the world’s most popular languages, and used by over 500 million people daily, it can do everything from ensuring you maximise your experience to getting you out of a jam.
Some of the app’s more notable features include:
- Offline capability: Download language packages and translate them while you’re offline.
- Live camera translator: Augmented reality translates words in real-time on your screen. Hold up a menu and watch it transform.
- Conversation translation: Real-time translation allows you to have a more efficient and natural conversation with a foreign language speaker.
9. YouTube
While books still have their place in a backpacker’s bag – particularly in compact e-reader form – entertainment has evolved. Video now makes up over 80% of consumer internet traffic; a number that’s only rising.
While Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+ are popular, perhaps the most valuable paid streaming service for backpackers, in our eyes at least, is YouTube Premium.
Why? Because YouTube offers a heady mix of traditional content like movies and TV shows, mixed in with ultra-valuable user-generated content. You can find travel inspiration, research your next destination, and even find out how to fix your backpack or speak a bit of basic Swahili. YouTube is becoming the world’s proxy university, and by paying for YouTube Premium you get to enjoy it ad-free, and gain the ability to download videos that you can watch offline!
10. NordVPN
The number one issue with streaming video on the road – beyond the inevitable connection issues – is geo-blocking. This is where certain content is blocked based on your current location, meaning that you don’t have full access to your chosen websites and streaming services.
A virtual private network (VPN) solves this issue by encrypting and rerouting your communications to make it look like you’re accessing the internet from elsewhere.
NordVPN is perhaps the most recognised, complete and reliable service in the VPN game. It offers endless server locations from which to choose, ensuring you’re always able to access the big game or those all-important FRIENDS reruns.
BONUS: Travello
Travello is a travel-specific social media platform that does more than reduce the amount of fast (and ultimately unnecessary) travel friends that most of us have added on Facebook and Instagram. This is a social network built specifically to help like-minded travellers find each other, through interest groups, meetups, social feeds and the ability to chat and match travel plans.
Post about your adventures and organically build a compatible crew. Tailor your search for new travel buddies by age, gender, nationality, location and more. With Travello, making friends on the road is super easy (and super fun!)
The 10 (+1) tools above will allow you to minimise the work of backpacking while maximising the fun. Supported by this solid technological foundation, you’ll be ready to build the ultimate backpacking adventure.
