The best free travel apps

Planning a trip abroad - or a trip around the world - takes a bit of organisation, and your phone can do a surprising amount of the heavy lifting for free. The right handful of apps will navigate foreign cities offline, find you a bed for the night, convert prices on the fly and keep you in touch with home. Here is our up-to-date selection of the best free travel apps, plus the one companion app that keeps all the others safe to use.

1. Getting Around

• Organic Maps / Maps.me: offline navigation champions. Download the maps for the countries on your route before you leave, and you can search, navigate and build itineraries with no data connection at all - you have the right to get lost wherever you want, and still find your way back.
• Rome2Rio: can't decide how to get from London to Bangkok, or Sydney to Brisbane? Rome2Rio compares every mode of transport available - flights, trains, buses, ferries, even walking - with estimated times and costs for each, so you can trade money against time intelligently.
• Google Maps offline areas: worth setting up as a backup - download the region around each city you'll visit and public-transport directions keep working when the roaming data doesn't.

2. Accommodation

• Booking.com: the reference point for hotel booking, with traveller reviews, flexible cancellation filters and rates that often beat walk-in prices.
• Agoda: especially strong for hotels, hostels and B&Bs across Asia, frequently with the best local rates in the region.
• Airbnb: if you want to live like a local rather than sleep beside a lobby, the app makes it easy to find apartments and rooms near wherever you happen to be standing.

3. Flights

• Skyscanner: one of the best flight comparison tools anywhere, for domestic hops and round-the-world itineraries alike. The "whole month" and "everywhere" searches are perfect for flexible travellers hunting the cheapest dates and destinations.

A privacy tip that doubles as a money tip: airlines and booking sites adjust prices by market. Browsing with a VPN lets you compare fares as seen from different countries - sometimes with pleasant surprises.

4. Money and Budget

• XE Currency: spares you the mental arithmetic. Live exchange rates when you're online, and it keeps the last rates cached for offline conversions at the market stall.
• Splitwise: travelling with friends? It tracks who paid for what in any currency and settles the maths at the end, keeping friendships intact.
• TravelSpend or Tricount: simple budget trackers that let you set a daily budget per country and sort expenses by category - accommodation, food, transport - so the money lasts as long as the trip.

5. Communication

• WhatsApp: the traveller's lifeline. Messages, photos, voice and video calls over any Wi-Fi connection, free with anyone who has the app - which, worldwide, is nearly everyone.
• Google Translate: download the languages for your route and the camera mode translates menus and signs offline. It has rescued countless dinners.
• Duolingo: a few minutes of daily practice in the weeks before departure, and you'll arrive with enough of the local language to earn smiles.

6. Saving Your Pictures

• Google Photos: holidays produce thousands of photos; phones get lost, stolen and dropped in harbours. Set the app to back up over Wi-Fi and your memories are safe in the cloud, accessible from anywhere, with generous free storage to start.

7. Staying Safe on Public Wi-Fi and Beating Censorship

• Le VPN app: the app that protects all the others. Every app above constantly sends your data - logins, card details, messages, locations - and on the open Wi-Fi networks travellers depend on (airports, cafés, hotels, hostels), that data is exposed to whoever runs or spoofs the hotspot. The Le VPN app encrypts everything your phone sends and receives, so booking a room from a hostel lobby is as safe as doing it from home.

There’s a second reason it belongs on every packing list: censorship. Heading to China, Vietnam, or another country with strict internet restrictions? Many everyday apps and sites - including some on this list - are blocked there. Connecting through one of Le VPN’s servers in 100+ locations restores your usual internet, and the Stealth WireGuard protocol is built to get through even networks that use deep packet inspection to block ordinary VPNs. As a bonus, connecting to a server back home keeps your banking apps and home streaming services working exactly as usual - check what any site sees of your location on the IP test page.

One subscription covers up to 10 devices simultaneously - phone, laptop, tablet, and a travel partner’s phone too - with apps for iOS, Android, Windows and macOS.

Travel light, travel smart, and travel protected: get Le VPN before your next trip. Your first purchase is covered by a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can trial it across a whole holiday risk-free.