In the last few years, there has been a growth in the number of female travellers. These trippers are ready to explore the different corners of the country and world – sometimes with their family/friends or at times on their own. According to the report, woman solo travel in India has seen a growth of 29% last year, as compared to 18% of 2014.

Fortunately, age is no longer considered a stigma – one of the many reasons why Indian women of all ages are feeling more confident about travelling alone. The number of women travellers has increased in the international spectrum too. Celebrating the beauty of women and their ardent love for travel, on this Women’s Day, we have listed few mobile apps below that might be highly relevant to them:

 #1 bSafe

Safety of travellers, especially women travellers is really important to us. bSafe is an ultimate safety app with outstanding features. It has multiple options for both everyday safety and real emergencies. Users can set up their own network of friends, family and co-workers. Consequently, they can share locations to find each other seamlessly. If female travellers sense danger while walking at night, they can easily ask friends to walk with them via Follow Me’s live GPS trace. There’s a ‘Time Mode’ feature to programme an alarm that will trigger automatically if the travellers have not checked in at the scheduled time. It also has a ‘Fake Call’ option that might be necessary to move out of unfavourable situations.

Available on Google Play Store and Apple iTunes

#2 HERE Maps

This mobile app is an ideal companion for all forms of journeys! It is a navigation system which also displays real-time traffic, turn-by-turn voice guidance, speed limit information and a simple directions list. Female travellers can use this tool to hop on the buses or take trains, with public routes for over 1,200 cities around the world. It can run smoothly on the phone without the use of the internet. Users can download maps for over 100 countries by paying no amount at all.

Available on Google Play Store and Apple iTunes

#3 Swachh Bharat Toilet Locator

Swachh Bharat Toilet Locator is a mobile app that can be used by female travellers to reach the nearest restrooms with the support of navigation system. It lists washrooms that are generally free to use in the public spaces. The app supports public ratings based on hygiene, infrastructure and safety thus allowing users to know more about the conditions of washrooms. It also provides a user-friendly platform for giving feedbacks and submitting new entries.

Available on Google Play Store

#4 Hostelworld

Many trippers travel on a limited budget. Keeping this in mind, we introduce you to Hostelworld – a mobile app that allows people to book beds or rooms in any of 33,000 hostels, hotels and motels around the globe. Booking is absolutely free of cost and there are just no hidden costs involved. It covers interesting destinations from USA, Europe, Australia, South America and Southeast Asia. Like other trippers, female solo travellers can go through the reviews of each accommodation and choose the place safest and most convenient to them. It has 3.5 million customer reviews.

Available on Google Play Store and Apple iTunes 

#5 Google Translate

Foreign languages can act as barriers for travellers. Understanding this, we have included the highly popular Google Translate app in our list. Google Translate can be a very helpful app for solo travellers. These trippers won’t have to depend on strangers for translating their content. Users can type and translate 90 languages with just a few clicks. Also, phone’s camera can be used to translate text instantly in 26 languages. Travellers can take advantage of this unique feature to translate the content of menu cards or hotel brochures. For the convenience of these travellers, there is a star and save option in the mobile app that can be used for future reference anytime.  It supports translation between Arabic, Afrikaans, Chinese, English, Gujarati etc.

Available on Google Play Store and Apple iTunes

If you know of any good apps that we can add to this list, do let us know about it!

The post Women’s Day Exclusive: 5 essential apps for solo female travellers appeared first on TravHQ.

While travelling in winters is fun, the season brings along many problems for the travellers. Flights get cancelled, trains delayed and roads are a nightmare because of low temperature and dense fog. Technology is an inevitable influencer of the travel industry today. Travellers use various apps extensively to simplify their journey.

Whether you are taking a flight, train or road, we have listed down the apps that will be of help during the coming winters:

#1: FlightStats

It is a free real-time flight status and airport tracking application developed by FlightStats – a leading travel brand that offers flight data services, trip solutions, and analytics to its customers at the global level. This app has a flight timeline section which helps the travellers get the latest flight updates on their cell phones. During winters as many flights run late or get cancelled, apps like FlightStats can be really useful.

This app has received a rating of 4.0/5 and users have appreciated it for giving accurate flight details and timely notifications for their travel plans. It has a simple user-interface with all relevant features like flight movements and airport weather.

You can download it here.

#2: NTES

National Train Enquiry System Android app is an official app of Indian Railways offering travel services for holiday vacation trips, official trips and daily commute. It has features such as live station, train schedule, diverted trains, real-time status queries and spot your train. In India, especially in winters, trains get delayed due to fog and rains. This app can help you track accurate status of your train so that you don’t end up spending hours at the station.

NTES has received a rating of 4.2 /5. While the interface isn’t something worth talking about, it does the job. Users have highlighted that it is possibly the best app without ads for spotting trains. It is one of the most trusted apps for train related bookings with nearly 5000,000 installs.

You can download it here here.

#3. RailYatri PNR Status & IRCTC Train info

This mobile application for train bookings can inform the travellers about their PNR statuses, train statuses, accurate wait-list confirmation predictions, GPS based enquiries, train time-tables, seat layouts etc. Developed by RailYatri, this app has possibly one of the largest and most updated train database on Indian railways.

With 4.4/5 rating, this app gives accurate data to the travellers. The app has been designed well and it offers taxi services in over 40+ cities giving it slight edge over NTES.

You can download it here.

#4. Accuweather

Road trips can be fun but unpredictable rain and fog can really hit your plans. Checking out weather information is deemed necessary for most of the travellers. Accuweather offers minute-by-minute weather forecast for cities, towns, latitudes and longitudes. Except predicting the weather in the days to come, Accuweather has current news and weather videos available in English and Spanish. Before you set off, check your route on maps and check the weather of major cities you will be crossing along the way so that you know what to expect.

Developed by Accuweather, it has received a rating of 4.3/5. It is considered to be one of the leading mobile apps for weather forecast across the world with around 100 million downloads.

You can download it here.

#5. HERE Maps

Developed by Nokia Apps LLC, HERE allows the download of offline maps so that the travellers can plan their journey ahead and save the maps of the destinations on the phone. This app provides online/offline maps of 100 countries around the world. It has public transit maps and information for around 1000 cities. It has an excellent and detailed voice-guided turn-by-turn navigation feature so that you spend more time looking out of the windscreen and less time looking at the map.

It has a received a rating of 4.4/5 and is mostly considered the best open-source map program in the app world. It is one of the prominent competitors of Google Map.

You can download it here.

What app would you like to add to this list?

The post Here are the apps you need to travel this winter! appeared first on TravHQ.

Connectivity is a major issue in our country and often as we step outside the city boundaries, the network quality deteriorates. That is why it is important to have offline maps on your device, especially when travelling to new areas where you aren’t sure about the routes or network status. Until now Google allowed you to store some regions of the map offline but the navigation option was missing. On top of that, the area was limited to few square kilometres leaving the feature pretty much useless.

Now however Google has added the offline navigation feature to Maps like they promised earlier at the Google I/O. Instead of small areas, you can now search for a region and download the map to your device. Once the maps have been downloaded, Google Maps will automatically go offline as soon as it encounters bad mobile network and will automatically switch back to internet to get realtime traffic status when it can.

The update is gradually rolling out on Android devices. The feature won’t be available on iOS immediately but will be coming out soon. They will be rolling out even more offline features with time. Until now travellers used to rely on alternatives like HERE maps to save on data costs and navigate in spotty network conditions but with Google Maps rolling out this update, the rivals might see some drop in usage.

The post Google Maps finally gets offline navigation appeared first on TravHQ.

Google and Apple provide impressive navigation apps on their mobile devices but they require an active internet connection to work. These apps for offline maps are available for free and would allow you to navigate without the use of a data connection which could be of great help for many.

I find myself listening to internet radio more often now. My telecom operator offers me heaps of data at decent speeds without giving me a heart attack at the end of month. Why should I even bother burning the limited storage space on my phone! Same goes with the maps. I tend to lose my way around the city but my phone, thanks to the internet and GPS, makes sure that I reach my destination. But then during a couple of outstation trips, I was left stranded on the side of the road waiting for any sign of mobile network. This made me rethink by dependency on online maps. Google Maps offers the option of saving maps offline but it isn’t possible to save more than 50km x 50 km. On top of that, the navigation doesn’t work offline so it is pretty much useless without an internet connection. Since then I have been trying to find some good offline maps and compiled a short list after living with them for a while. These apps would also be of great help if you have a limited data plan or if you travel abroad often. Of course you will have to download large maps first but you can do that on your home (or office) Wi-Fi or at the neighbourhood coffee shop.

Here maps

Nokia has been offering maps for mobile devices for a very long time now. The good old Symbian devices used to come with Ovi maps that would allow the users to download the maps for their country. High speed mobile data was non-existent in our country back then so the offline maps were really useful. Google Maps was in the picture but it didn’t offer features like navigation or offline access. The maps on Ovi weren’t as detailed as on the Google offering but still they were good for most parts of the country. Here Maps is the modern version of same old Ovi Maps. It was exclusive to Nokia until a while back but arrived on Android last year.

HERE gives you multiple options but the public transport suggestions aren’t very good

There are a lot of reasons to love this app. The voice guided navigation is detailed so you don’t have to look at the screen frequently while driving. You can choose to download maps by regions so you don’t end up wasting storage space for states you don’t plan on visiting anytime soon. And when you plan to, you can easily download the maps for that particular state before your visit. The interface is simple and it is easy to keep your pinned locations organised. This is one app you should definitely give a try.

The good

• Good voice guided navigation
• Neat interface
• Multiple map modes including public transit and satellite view
• Detailed public transport map and navigation
• Saved locations can be categorised

The bad

• Public transit navigation doesn’t always suggest the best route
• Skips some common routes at times
• Not very smooth on older devices

Download link: HERE maps

Mapfactor navigator

Mapfactor makes use of OpenStreetMaps for the map data and offers a plethora of features. It offers detailed turn by turn navigation for many countries and you can download the maps to your device for offline use. Just in case you are not a fan of OpenStreetMaps, you can choose to use map data by TomTom but you will have to pay for the latter. TomTom makes satellite navigation systems for vehicles and their maps are well tailored for the job. Mapfactor also offers a wide range of customisation options from colour of maps to the options on bottom bar.

The good

• Minute customisations possible on the calculated route
• Loads of features
• Multiple options for customising map view

The bad

• Too many customisation options are overwhelming for new users
• Doesn’t offer alternate routes at times
• Zooming in and out of map isn’t very smooth
• Resource hungry

Download link: Mapfactor Navigator

Navmii

Navmii is another navigation app which uses OpenStreetMaps and can be used offline. It doesn’t offer as many options as the apps listed above but simplicity works for many. The interface isn’t very fancy but it appears that they were targeting efficiency rather than flamboyance. You will be seeing an ad on the top but you can get rid of it by paying a nominal amount. There are multiple voice packs available for download including some paid celebrity voices. The best feature of this app is an integrated music player with large controls. The app has some rough edges that need to be filed out but it is well worth a try.

Integrated music player and large text are helpful

The good

• Integrated music player controls
• Useful voice guidance with multiple voice options
• Individual updates rather than costly packages

The bad

• Map gets unresponsive at times
• On screen ads get intrusive at times

Download link: Navmii

OSMAnd free

Okay we have got too many of the navigation apps running OpenStreetMaps but the reasons are very obvious. OSMAnd recently got a makeover to go better with the Android material design. The interface would take a while getting used to as the controls are a little confusing. What puts it above other navigation systems is the amount of content you have here. You can choose from multiple maps and even overlay it with maps by Bing if that works for you. Ski Map is a map pack which might not be very useful but indicated the range of options they have offered here.

The maps are detailed but entering address is tiresome

The good

• Loads of content and map data
• Offline performance even better than online at times

The bad

• The controls are a little confusing
• A bit too colourful
• Maps download at a very slow speed and even fail at times
• User needs to input address in parts

Download link: OSMAnd

Update- It was announced at the 2015 Google I/O that GMaps will also come with the option of downloadable maps soon.

The post These offline maps will save you from data costs on your next Trip appeared first on TravHQ.