With Valentine’s Day knocking on the door, many of you might be planning to do something extra-special for your loved ones. Fortunately, formulating ideas are much easier now. Thanks to technology that has accelerated the development of ultimate gadgets, devices and applications to make your life way simpler!

To help you out in the best possible manner, we have listed below few applications that might just make your Valentine’s Day more colourful.

#1 Hotel Deals – Take a refuge from home life!

Planning for a weekend getaway with your beloved? Hotel Deals might be really useful to you. This mobile application allows you to book your room with convenience and find the best hotel deals in destinations. It compares and lists prices of different booking rates from prominent travel agencies like Expedia, Orbitz and Skoosh. You can travel with your partner and enjoy the beauty of the destination with absolute ease.

Available on Google Play Store

#2 Restaurant Finder – To think well and sleep well, first dine well!

If food is your lover’s best friend, Restaurant Finder is the apt mobile application for you. It offers you a convenient way to search for restaurants based on your current location, address or zip code. When you select a restaurant, essential details like opening hours, reviews, phone numbers and food menus are displayed. Restaurant Finder can also be used to find meal takeaways and delivery, cafes, pubs, hotels, night clubs, grocery stores and gas stations. Travellers can have a perfectly romantic outing on Valentine’s Day.

Available on Google Play Store and iTunes

#3 Nearify – To just party on!

Valentine’s Day is not the day to stay at home. It’s the time to move out with your partner and enjoy the fun events around you! Nearify assists you to discover awesome and amazing events in your city. It can list trending events in Delhi, NCR, Gurgaon, Noida, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Pune etc. It covers events of international destinations like London, Boston, Las Vegas, Chicago and Singapore. Also, Nearify recommends a personalised list of events for you. Furthermore, you can invite your friends to your favourite events through it.

Available on Google Play Store and iTunes

#4 Camera360 – A save button for the mind’s eye

Valentine’s Day will be the perfect time for you and your partner to plan & create some beautiful moments of an outing. With Camera360 you can capture those moments in a magical manner. It has over 100 classic filters and countless capture themes for you to get the best shot! Travellers can use this app on Valentine’s Day for recording the special moments of a romantic getaway with their beloved. It’s the number 1 photography app in 7 countries and has 500 million users around the world, with excellent ratings.

Available on Google Play Store and iTunes

#5 ixigo cabs – For instant bookings!

Travelling in a new city can be a hurdle for you and your Valentine! Understanding this, we have included ixigo in our list. This mobile application aggregates the cheapest local and outstation cabs for your convenience. It offers many local radio cabs like Uber, Ola and Taxi for sure. The users of this application can compare prices, avoid surge, check availability and get a fare estimate prior to booking. Cancellation of cabs can be done easily too.

Available on Google Play Store  and iTunes

If there is any other app that’s interesting and can be added to the list, do let us know

Also Read: 5 essential wildlife apps for travellers in India

The post 5 essential apps to make Valentine week special for travellers appeared first on TravHQ.

India is witnessing a sudden boom in travel startups for the past few years. A few contributory factors can be the wide availability of internet, smartphone penetration and, more importantly, the exponentially growing number of inbound and outbound travellers. We learn about new travel startups everyday and some of them really push the envelope of innovation.

To identify and support such innovations, we announced our Startup Knockdown series of events recently. The first event in the series will be hosted in Mumbai next month in association with OTM Mumbai and the second event will be hosted in New Delhi in association with FICCI and Amadeus. Not only will the startups get to showcase their product in front of leading industry professionals but will also have other opportunities to give their business a boost.

While we hunt for the next Uber or Airbnb, check out some travel startups that have been making news in India:

#1 Tripoto

Founded by Anirudh Gupta and Michael Lyngdog in 2013, Tripoto offers travel itineraries for travellers and holiday makers. It has a huge collection of photos, reviews and recommendations shared by travellers who have explored the different corners of the world and are ready to communicate their travel experiences with others. Also, users have the liberty to add attractive trips in their wishlist.

Language: English

#2 iTraveller

Launched by Shiju Radhakrishnan in 2012, iTraveller provides 3,50,000+ trips for 450+ destinations at highly competitive rates compared to other online travel booking sites. It offers packages at extremely cheap rates simply because of very few intermediates. It allows travellers to discover, plan and book tickets instantly by connecting them with the native destinations suppliers.

Language: English

#3 goMowgli

Founded by Sunil Abhilash, Anil Alur, and Karan Cariappa in 2013, goMowgli claims to be India’s first hop-on and hop-off bus for travellers. Through this service, travellers can engage in innumerable activities, stay wherever they want with absolute freedom. The interesting feature of goMowgli is that the bus passes it offers is valid till 60 days from the date of first travel. This allows travellers to make changes in their travel itineraries at the last minute with no complications.

Language: English, German, French, Spanish

#4 SeekSherpa

Launched by Dhruv Raj Gupta and Sukhmani Singh in 2014, SeekSherpa lets travellers feel as comfortable as locals in destinations. Its platform allows locals to post their experiences. Travellers can easily book their experiences and post travel-related questions directing them to locals of their choice. Also, the website features many categories such as shopping, photograph and nightlife tours.

Language: English

#5 Guiddoo

Founded by Vineet Budki, Nidhi Varma, Darshan Sharma and Prashant Choudhary in 2013, Guiddoo is one-stop shop for travellers willing to indulge in tours, activities, audio-visual travelling, restaurants, spas and shopping. Its mobile app helps the users to enrich their travel experiences. Also, the app allows users to take pictures of point of interests and share it on their social channels.

Language: English

#6 Routofy

Launched by IIT graduates Abhishek Aggarwal and Ronak Gupta last year, Routofy is quite different from other online travel portals. It can search for flights, trains and buses all at once between any two destinations. Direct and indirect connections at cheap rates are displayed to the users from the favourite providers. This unique portal has already received great response from the Indian travel industry and was financially backed last year by the founders of Snapdeal.

Language: English

#7 Nearify

Founded by Mayank Kumar, Saurav Singh and Vivek Srivastava in 2012, Nearify is an event discovery platform that can be used by the travellers in their favourite destinations. It accumulates information of concerts, music festivals, parties, workshops, shows and meet-ups and categorises them according to traveller’s current location, genre of entertainment etc.

Language: English

#8 PressPlay

Launched by two friends Anand Sinha and George Abraham in 2013, PressPlay offers travel entertainment service to tourers. Interested travellers can stream or download movies, music for free under 2 minutes when connected to its hotspot. In buses, the company provides its app on fully-charged tablets for INR 100. Travellers can do away with the boredom they usually experience while travelling anywhere.

Language: English

#9 Byond Travel

Founded by Vikram Ahuja last year, Byond Travel offers 100+ unforgettable travel experiences from 40+ countries. It provides wildlife adventures, houseboat explorations, treks to Himalayas, deep-sea diving in Sri Lanka and many other activities guided by travel adventurers and experts. Byond Travel packages range from Rs. 50,000 to Rs. 1.5 lakh. It has a remarkable collection of travel experiences in its Lime Diaries collective.

Language: English

#10 Padhaaro

Founded by Ish Jindal in 2012, Padhaaro is an on-demand marketplace that connects foreign travellers with Indian locals. It assists travellers right from the time they plan their trips to the time they arrive at the destination. They can book tours and local experiences through it while being on-the-go. This startup believes in improving India’s image in the eyes of the international travellers.

Language: English

Are you a travel startup looking to leave a mark?

If you have an amazing product for the travel industry, don’t miss the chance to showcase at the Startup Knockdown events. Send your pitch deck to editor@travhq.com. Follow the links for more details- Startup Knockdown Mumbai | Startup Knockdown Delhi.

For any queries, drop us a mail at the above email ID or reach us through our social media accounts Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn.

The post Our pick of India’s 10 coolest travel startups that stole the limelight appeared first on TravHQ.