7 best social apps for travellers

Planning for a vacation is as much enjoyable as departing for the trip itself.

There are numerous websites and applications dedicated to travellers, help them making the right choices for their trips. Some of them assist travellers to organize their trips like TripIt, Kayak, or Skyscanner. Some of them help travellers to find hotel deals like Booking.com or even last minute deals near your location like HotelTonight. And along your journey, there are amazing applications help you make your vacation more expectable like DriveWeather, GasBuddy, and Waze for your road trips, or simply recommend your best seat with your airline like SeatGuru, and many more...

Picking up a destination and drafting out your daily activities come first in your vacation checklist. There is no better way to explore a new place than the advice from the locals or people who have travelled there before. While you can get helpful reviews from friends or certain communities on some existing social media apps, they are not designed for travellers. 

There are many social media apps with special designs for travellers. These are among of the best social apps for travellers that provide authentic information and local tips for your specific locations, with custom features basing on travellers’ insights, to maximize your travel experience.

1. Spotted by Locals

This app offers tons of helpful guides for over 70 cities. These are the handpicked sightseeing and activities ideas by locals. Some might be a bit bizarre for tourists as they come from the real local people.

With free version, you cannot access to full city guide and save spots. The offline mode is not available in free version either.

Download: Spotted by Locals for iOS | Android  (Free, in-app purchases available)

2. Travello

Travello is made for people with travelling interest. In your feed, you will see inspiring posts created by people travelling around the world. If you want to connect with other travellers on the app, you can comment on their photos or message them.

Travello also support users to find groups of like-minded travellers within the app like Solo Travellers, Travel Bloggers, Digital Nomad, Backpackers Australia, Backpackers Asia...

Download: Travello for iOS | Android (Free)

3. Withlocals

This app connects you with the local tour guides and helps you plan the local experience through activities like food tours, bike tours, day trips, art tours or even some workshops.

Download: Withlocals for iOS | Android (Free)

4. Foursquare

Foursquare is a pillar in travel applications for many years. About a decade ago, Foursquare started as an app for location check-in and share your check-ins with friends or family in real time. Today, it becomes a great source of recommendations.

From cafes, bars, hotels, airport, shopping, sights, nightlife, arts ... you can find any places with any specific search term. For each place, there are informative tips telling you how to have the best experience out of those places.

With Foursquare, you can sort the places by ratings, connections, and distance, which is good for both spontaneous travellers and coordinated group of tourists.

This app can be your travel buddy as it has the ability to learn what you like through out your check-ins and ratings to places in your own city, and then suggest similar places when you travel.

Download: Foursquare for iOS | Android (Free)

5. Cool cousin

This cool app connects you with locals in order to experience their personal recommendations of the city in your coming trip. You can choose you personal guide of your preference and get connected with like-minded local people in over 100 cities.

Download: Coolcousin for iOS | Android (Free)

6. Eatwith

If you are into culinary, check out Eatwith. This platform provides an interesting way to meet people by food tours or cooking classes, and even booking a private diner table and dining with a local host.

You will have opportunity to eat local cuisines or even home-cooked food, while enjoying the story of its origin. In some cases, you can even book a dinner or a cooking class with the local chefs hosting at their home.

Download: Eatwith for iOS | Android (Free)

7. TripAdvisor

This travel platform is still one of the best of its kind with huge source of valuable reviews for hotels and attractions.

Even though TripAdvisor does offer hotel and restaurant booking service alongside, which makes it questionable about the genuine of the reviews, it has undeniably loyal travel communities. With over 700 million reviews of 8 million destinations, TripAdvisor definitely a good source of reference when you are planning for your vacation.

Download: TripAdvisor for iOS | Android (Free)

Travelling in small group of friends or family members is becoming prominent, especially in the current pandemic. According to Savills Hotels division, there are increasing numbers of solo travellers, couples or small tourist groups during the pandemic in 2020 and 2021; and they are willing to travel to low-risk places. This trend will continue growing in the coming years. More than ever, modern travellers need to have some handy travel planning applications in order to design a thorough vacation plan for your own gang, and create for memorable moments with beloved ones.

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