Best Travel Apps 2014

Flight:

Saving you time and money the Skyscanner is a search engine for travel.  Originally only for flights, it has recently branched out to hotels and car rentals. But its flight search engine is the strongest, and it is very accurate, and very good. The app is used for booking travel on the go. Basically, this is a free flight comparison app. It is so easy! You type in where you are going from and to and when (departure and arrival, in other words), and how many passengers.

Skyscanner then searches for the best fit flight for your needs. Free. Android and iOS. Various airline apps — Needless to say, once you've bought your ticket, you should go to the respective airline app (if you’re on your phone or tablet) and tweak your seat if you like. Going to the airline’s sites before purchasing air fare suspiciously correlates with prices being raised on the previously searched flights’ tickets.

Hotel:

Hotel Tonight — This best free travel app for 2014 is super for its intended use: booking last-minute hotel rooms. Those big sites like Expedia, Travelocity, Priceline, Kayak, etc provide the whole package, but you've heard of them. Hotel Tonight has daily deals that go live every day at noon. Click on a hotel and see a list of amenities and a user-generated “why we like it” section. Because this for that very day, you get much steeper discounts than the other hotel-finding apps and websites. Free. Android and iOS.

  

Food:

Urbanspoon — You've probably heard of Urbanspoon yourself, as it is very popular. There are now over 800,000 restaurants total; to use it, search by what’s closest to you, cuisine type, price, what’s currently open. Shake your phone to get a new result. You can create your own “My Urbanspoon” profile and share your own reviews, photos of the restaurants and meals there.  For restaurants closest to you, you need to turn your location tracking on. Free Android and iOS.

TruxMap — Food trucks are so fun and popular these days, and Truxmap tells you where they are in real-time. Since food trucks are mobile, tracking them is a lot easier with this app. It uses Google Maps with pinned locations, and the green pins indicate which food trucks are currently open, as well as providing a list of which food trucks will be open the next day. So it might say Portland Oregon: 15 food trucks open now, 4 food trucks opening later today, 9 are scheduled for tomorrow. It even pulls the twitter accounts of food trucks that have them. TruxMap is only available in major cities in the US at this time; as this is where food trucks are most popular. Free. Android and iOS.