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Having travelled as a content creator for nearly 15 years, I have come to rely on many excellent websites, apps, resources and services that make your life on the road just a little bit easier.
Of course, we also provide many travel guides, tips, and detailed itineraries right here at Indie Traveller! But… just as any other travellers, we also use a wealth of travel tools to organize our trips — and I thought it would be useful to collect the best of them here.
Be sure to bookmark the following sites to help you plan your next trip!
Maps.me (or the newer alternative Organic Maps) – an app I can never do without!Flights search & tools
Besides the obvious Google Flights, I also recommend using Kiwi, which has a number of more advanced search options. It’s the only search engine I know of that will suggest combining tickets with two different carriers (a “self-connecting flight”) which can sometimes be a lot cheaper.
The Nomad feature even lets you choose your destination and the length you wish to stay, then provides the cheapest dates to fly — great for digital nomads.
Another great and easy-to-use flight search engine. In particular I recommend using the Flight Insight feature to dig deeper and find cheaper flights (for instance, it shows you the cheapest times of the year to fly on a particular route).
Tip: Don’t miss my guide on how to use flight search engines to always find the best deals! However, to avoid customer service issues, DO NOT book with search engines but the airlines directly. My in-depth tips show how to get the best airfares with the least possible headaches.
Not so secret anymore — but this is the place to find crazy airline deals and so-called error fares. These ultra-cheap flights usually do involve multiple stops or departures from obscure airports, but there are some amazing opportunities here for the flexible travel hacker.
Going (formerly Scott’s Cheap Flights) is another site letting you take advantage of airlines’ mistake fares. Since deals are constantly changing, this is one website where it’s handy to receive emails on new bargains so you don’t miss out.
OnwardTicket: a real life-saver if you need to fly one-way without a return ticketAre you flying one-way without a return? This can potentially get you into trouble. With Onward Ticket, you can “rent” a flight as proof of onward travel to show to border control or airline. This takes the stress off of being denied boarding or country entry because of not having an exit flight.
They will send you a real plane ticket, though it’s valid for only 48 hours and you only pay a small service fee. I have used this succesfully several times.
Stuck in the airport for a night but don’t want to spend the money on accommodation? Well, There’s a site that for that! Find tips, airport reviews, and the best (or least bad) sleeping spots in terminals.
It has seating layouts for every imaginable flight, helping you find the best available seats. I’m a tall guy so I like to keep my eye out for any special rows with more leg space!
The prime website for in-depth guides on how to wring every last benefit from your credit card or air miles account. (Best for US travellers.)
Overland transport
Easily find out how to get from point A to point B with the best site for finding transport connections and price estimates on flights, buses, trains, taxis, and more.
Unlike AI, which is often guessing, Rome2Rio directly queries actual databases of transport info. However, it is incomplete in developing countries where transport options and schedules are often more informal. In these destinations, use it just to get a general idea.
The best site for booking any kind of transportation in Southeast Asia. This Singapore-based platform brings together all the train, minibus, coach bus, and ferry options.
My favorite transport booking site for Latin America in particular. Its Canadian founders started the site after a backpacking trip in South America where they realized there wasn’t a convenient centralized way to make bookings. Busbud covers other parts of the world too, but their coverage for Latin America in particular is excellent.
A great booking site for buses but also for more obscure transport connections by minibus, ferry, shuttle, etc. I particularly like their coverage of routes in Mexico, Costa Rica, and Colombia.
The ultimate site on rail travel around the world. Seat61 breaks down how to travel comfortably, sustainably, and cost-effectively by skipping the flights and opting for a train instead. It has information on travel in Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia, and the Americas.
This is the ultimate app for any overland road trip. A volunteer-run app, users can submit locations for all types of camping – including car camping, paid campgrounds, wild camping locations, and hostels. It’s also invaluable for its warnings for disruptions or dangers on the road. (I’ve used it in Mexico to steer clear of potential cartel or separatist roadblocks, for instance!)
Think of it like an international Uber – BlaBlaCar is a rideshare platform that covers longer distances. Use it to get from one city to another, or even between countries. And not to worry – Blablacar is review-based if you’re nervous about being in a car with a stranger. It operates mainly in Europe, but more recently also in India, Mexico, Brazil, and elsewhere.
Travel insurance
There are numerous travel insurance providers, but here I’ll highlight two that I’ve used myself and that are ideally suited for adventure travel or nomading.
Heymondo offers strong coverage, no deductibles, and they have their own streamlined app with 24/7 assistance. They also have some tailored packages for long stay travel or annual multi-trip insurance that are great for longer trips. I’ve used Heymondo continuously since 2020 and you can read my full review here, including my experiences with making an actual claim.
This insurer is ideal if you’re traveling longer (e.g. round-the-world trips or ongoing nomading). The price can be quite low, especially if you’re younger (the premiums depend on age).
The catch? Unlike typical travel insurers, it doesn’t really focus on theft insurance or any other extras, instead being more geared towards medical insurance and emergencies. There is also a higher deductible. But if you want no-frills long-term insurance that still covers you for bigger (medical) emergencies, SafetyWing may be a great fit for you.
Budget & Money Saving
Priceoftravel and Budget Your Trip
Both these sites are great for finding estimated daily budgets and concrete information on the cost of food, accommodation, and other expenses around the world. They rely on user-submitted data, so they are often better with providing realistic averages than sites sharing info from just a single trip.
It’s always a good idea to travel with multiple forms of payment. I use both Revolut and Wise as backup cards while travelling. They both offer debit cards that let you take out up to €200 a month (or your local equivalent) from foreign ATMs without any fees from the card issuer.
Wise is also very fair when it comes to currency conversions, which are much lower than what banks typically charge with far fewer markups.
Wise’s benefits aren’t as good for US customers, but if you’re from Europe or another part of the world you may find this one of the more efficient ways to handle money abroad. Sign up for free here.
Ever been frustrated with ATMs abroad charging exorbitant fees? Well, not anymore with the ATM Fee Saver app, which gives you clear information on ATM locations and expected withdrawal fees.
Often there are still local banks with lower fees and this app makes it easy to find them! About 160 destinations are currently covered, including many countries in Europe, Latin America and Southeast Asia. While a Revolut or Wise card avoids fees on your end, ATM Fee Saver minimizes any charges made by the bank in the destination.
Are you traveling together? Then Splitwise is just amazing for splitting your bills, or just keeping track of your expenses.
I use Splitwise all the time whenever I’m traveling with a group. You can easily add expenses to the list, specify who it should be split with, and keep track of who’s paid.
The best feature is that you can automatically settle all your bills at the end of your trip.
Finding Accommodation
Hostelworld is still the place to look for hostels, but also cheap B&Bs and budget hotels. User ratings are typically pretty accurate and reliable. Always look for ones with a high atmosphere rating!
In recent years, Hostelworld has been adding a social layer to its platform via the app. This easily lets you team up with other travellers or join tours together through the destination and hostel-specific chat groups that open up once you’re made a booking.
Perfect for finding smaller-scale or family-run hotels, because hotel owners can submit themselves for listing on Booking.com, instead of having to sell their beds in bulk to a major player like Expedia.
I generally use Booking.com for my hotel bookings anywhere. If you’re travelling for a while, you can quickly become a Genius member which unlocks various perks and discounts.
Asia-focused sister site of Booking.com. Sometimes the prices are lower on Agoda for properties in Southeast Asia. Sadly, the Agoda app is also a lot more spammy, using various coupon systems and promotions to engage users, which I think are actually quite annoying. Customer service also isn’t always as good, with stricter cancellation/refund policies.
I think it’s best to use Agoda if you’re on a budget or on a long-term trip in Asia when the savings can be worth it, but when there’s less pressure than, say, on your tightly scripted 1-week vacation.
House-swapping or housesitting is a way of staying in someone’s house for free, often for a couple of months, in exchange for looking after the house while its owners are away. Although it does come with a yearly fee, that cost is minute in comparison to what you might spend on independent accommodation. Not only that, but you get a whole place to yourself!
If you follow the link to Trusted Housesitters here, a 20% discount for Indie Traveller readers is automatically applied.
I used to recommend Couchsurfing all the time — the site where you can stay on people’s couches or spare rooms for free (as a form of cultural exchange and international friendship and not to make money). I never surfed but attended numerous Couchsurfing meetups and hosted for a while. Alas, the site seemingly became a bit of a relic as it went commercial and lost the plot.
But at last… Couchers.org is trying to build a new community just like it, but better — and it’s run as a non-profit. Based on its platform design and strong safety focus this is now the hospitality exchange I suggest checking out if you’d like to try travelling in this way. Remember that couchsurfing is not about getting stuff for free or hooking up — it’s about community and cultural exchange, and used in that spirit it can be amazing.
Airbnb has its detractors, with some complaining about annoying guest policies or hidden fees. However I have honestly had few issues using it and it remains a goldmine for smaller-scale places to stay, often with more local character than hotels.
One of the biggest volunteer placement organizations around. The classic WWOOF experience is to get free accommodation on a farm in exchange for doing some chores, though there are all sorts of other placements available.
Travel Guides & Research
Okay, this is one app I literally never travel without.
The first thing that should be said about Organic Maps is that you can always use it offline. It’s also based on the crowdsourced Open Street Maps, which means it has details that no other maps have. I often find tiny things on there like narrow hiking trails, hidden waterfalls, etc. where other maps just show you an empty void.
Organic Maps is an offshoot of Maps.me, another app I used to recommend, until they were acquired and shifted toward aggressive monetization and user tracking. Organic Maps is free, open-source, and does not track users. It’s also better in some important ways, such as the trail layer that clearly shows any officially recognized hiking trails.
It’s super useful if you’re ever going hiking, but also great for city exploration. This app was a serious life-saver when I was trying to find my way through the infinite windy alleyways of the medina in Fez, Morocco — and so many other places where I’d have gotten totally lost!
In some developing countries, Organic Maps is also much better for road navigation. I found this to be the case in Albania, where the commercial map apps were a mess (as they had not yet bothered to do a proper survey of this country), but Openstreetmaps held up really well.
This app literally does what it says on the tin: it has all the trails. I can’t think of any site that has more hiking information than this one! It’s especially useful (potentially even a life-saver) in less developed destinations where a lack of info or signage can often make find your way a lot less obvious.
Each hike listing tells you the distance, elevation gain, and route type along with a brief description of how to find the trailhead and what to expect on the hike. If you love to hike, then it’s highly worth subscribing to the full version so you get the complete routes with GPS coordinates.
A free, community-authored travel guide; in essence, it’s the Wikipedia of travel. I mainly use this site to do some basic ‘where to go and how to get there’ research, and less so for restaurants or places to stay (as this information is often out of date). It seems to be going out of fashion nowadays with AI being a first port of call for high-level info, but I like the human touch of community-created wikis.
An amazing resource if you are planning a road trip. Detailed information on 50+ countries.
One of the few legit old-school travel guide publishers around with truly well-researched and deeply written guides, sometimes to places other publishers won’t bother with (e.g. small African nations or central Asia). Some of their guides remind me of the phenomenal Lonely Planet guides from 20+ years ago, before they started becoming more like glorified brochures! Bradt acquired Footprint a while ago, publishers of the iconic South American Handbook among others.
Still a good publisher of (paper) travel guides, though these seem to have taken a backseat to their new business of providing tailored tours and travel planning services. A bit wordier and history-focused than Lonely Planet, they’ve kept their focus squarely on budget / mid-range travel rather than the more luxury-slanted guides.
Atlas Obscura offers ‘things to do in…’ lists, but very different from the typical fare, often trying to showcase smaller quirky sights, like some hidden old library or a shop that sells only time travel equipment. Very fun to browse.
Nomads.com (formerly Nomadlist)
Originally created as a community for remote workers, however the info is very useful even if you’re not a laptop-tapping traveller. Every country also has its own forum and community input.
Just know that the cost estimates are usually based on a digital nomad renting an apartment in the city center, getting a gym subscription, restaurant food, etc. whereas a tourist or budget long-term traveler may have very different spending patterns.
This fantastic wiki helps you easily find walking trails. They are especially useful for developing countries where good trail info is often missing or hard to find. While not as curated or clean as Alltrails, it’s a nice alternative that also helps you navigate the trails via GPS.
The subreddits /r/travel and /r/backpacking are excellent resources for general and destination-specific travel tips. /r/travel regularly nominates a Destination of the Week, and by looking up these country-specific threads in the archives you can unlock a gigantic wealth of information.
For a more intimate community with mostly more experienced travellers, try /r/travelnopics. (It started as an alternative to a once very selfie-heavy /r/travel, but then just continued its life as a smaller down-to-earth community.)
Safety and Security
While it’s not quite perfect, the Global Peace Index assigns an overall score to each country. Additionally, it will provide you with the scores of militarization, society and security, and domestic and internal conflict. To dig even deeper, you can see a list of full stats that show why any given country is rated what it is.
The travel cost and cost-of-living website Numbeo also has an extensive crime survey that includes some specific crowdsourced data on the local perceptions of crime and safety. Each country shows safety stats of walking alone during daylight versus night, which can be especially helpful for travelers in a new city.
UK government travel advisories
I routinely check the UK Foreign Office’s travel advisories to get a better sense of the safety situation wherever I’m going. I first got into this habit because I lived in the UK, but even after moving I kept relying on them simply because they’re some of the best reports available.
I recommend mostly ignoring the litigation-obsessed US travel advisories, which are a bit of a joke in the travel community. The UK does it much better — informing of serious and realistic risks, but never getting over-the-top or paranoid. There are often maps which are helpfully color-coded, so that even if a particular region has issues it won’t make you miss out on other safer areas.
Local Guides
This platforms connect travellers with individual local guides, in much the same way Airbnb does for rooms and apartments.
One of the largest aggregators of tours such as day-trips and organized activities. While you can often find last-minute or local providers in the location — especially if you are not in a rush –if you’re planning a more tightly scripted trip then using a platform like GetYourGuide can be a great idea. You can pre-book your activities very efficiently and you’ll benefit from cancellation protection.
Eat With links tourists with locals to experience authentic cuisine of the destinations you visit. While many destinations are in Europe, you’ll be able to find food connections all over the world including countries like Thailand and Vietnam. Ever wanted to try homecooked pho in someone’s home, channeling your inner Anthony Bourdain? EatWith makes this a lot easier.
Volunteering and Work
For an online listing of hosts who will offer accommodation in exchange for short-term work, HelpX is a good start. You can search based on the region of a country, although there is no search bar if there is specific work you’re looking for. There is both a free and paid option, but at just 20 Euros for 2 years, it’s a vast savings in comparison to what you would otherwise spend on accommodation.
Similar to HelpX, Workaway has a more user friendly interface, albeit a higher fee at $42 USD per year for one person. However, there is a search bar that allows you to narrow down the job type and location. Don’t care where you work? Search for hosts on a global scale! It also provides a calendar of what months the host needs help which takes out some of the guesswork.
Both connect freelancers with all kinds of one-off jobs. Upwork tends to be very competitive to start out unless you have specific skills and references, but if you’re tenacious enough, it can be a great source of income. If you opt to using Fiverr, this can be nice because it’s always a fixed payment so you know exactly how much you’ll be making no matter how fast you get the job done.
A skill based word trade website, Working Traveller is specifically for building references and improving your skills. This is extremely helpful for if you want to hone in on something particular and have referrals for work experience when you go back home. Even better, this website is free to start with, and only $10 per year if you want to contact hosts without a limit.
Specifically, Job Monkey is for finding the coolest jobs. If you’re the type to get bored easily, this is perfect to find a seasonal job that’s more out of the box. Job Monkey will mainly guide you in the right direction to searching job boards, but it’s the perfect way to start your filtering.
Exactly as it sounds, this job engine is for finding work that is location independent. Listings will show if the job is for any location, a specific time zone, or a certain country. Typically all it takes is uploading your resume to an open position making the application process quick and simple.
Language Learning
Both language learning tools have a similar goal: To help you learn a language for free. They have courses you can follow along with games that don’t make you feel like you’re learning, while still rapidly absorbing the basic vocab and grammar you need for a local conversation or two.
Visas
Depending on your nationality and destination, you can often get a visa-on-arrival. But in cases where this is not possible, or when you want to stay longer, be sure to check Visa HQ. For a fee, they can sort out everything for you, so that you don’t have to go to an embassy and do all the paperwork yourself.
Consider all your visa headaches gone for good! Visa list allows you to input your home country, and from there you can see where you can travel to visa-free, and for how long. For the countries you do need to apply for, it provides a link if you’re able to do so online. Visas aside, it will tell you any additional documents you need to bring with you, such as vaccination proof or registration.
English (US) · 