
Travel Resources To Make Your Life Easier On The Road
Having the right resources has made our life easier on the road. We have learned a lot and made mistakes along the way. We've gathered resources to help make YOUR traveling easier. All links you see below are resources we personally use and endorse. If you are a company looking to get on this page, click the "Partner" link below. Some of these links might be affiliate sites that pay us when you click on them. Thanks for supporting us if you do.
Shopping Websites
Amazon
We use Amazon and are Prime Members, which we highly recommend! Not only do we love the ease of Amazon, we love the prices. They are competitive and with Free Shipping with Prime, it really can't be beat. We get a small kickback if you shop through this link. We hope if you are going to shop, you do so through this link so we can continue helping other change their perspective on life through travel.
REI
We have been using REI for years! The greatest thing about them, is their rewards program. When you buy something you get a percentage back that you can spend on something else online or in-store. We love their no hassle return policy and if you buy something here, and it breaks while traveling, just return it and get a new one or use the money for another purchase!
Leisure Pro
Scuba Diving your thing? It sure is for us! We have used Leisure Pro to get our gear. We find their prices to be the best at times for a myriad of products. They have no good customer service and return policies as well for certain items.
Hotel Booking Websites
Booking a hotel through a website or app has advantages. You can link a credit card and skip the risk of getting it cloned or compromised while on the road. We use these booking sites which all have the ability to pay before you stay. Just be aware that some places will give you a "lesser" room to cover the service fees from these sites. Many times we will book with these sites for a day or two, and if we like the hotel, we will strike up a deal with the hotel to pay the same to them (or less sometimes) then we paid through the original service.
Hotels.com
Hotels.com has been a staple for us for years! We find that especially in the US and Central America, It is particularly useful. We are Gold Status Members and have been for years. Buy 10 nights and get the 11th free (average nightly stay credit) We have used dozens of free nights. Their customer service is good too. There have been a few places we’ve stayed where the room wasn’t adequate or area of town so bad, we couldn’t stay. We let them know, and they have refunded us every time.
Agoda.com
Agoda is a good choice. We have mostly used this company in Asia. They seem to have the market share in Asia over Hotels.com. However, we found their pricing competitive and fair. We have used their customer service as well on a room where someone working at the hotel, walked into our room while we were in bed. Agoda was prompt and courteous in getting us booked somewhere else free of charge. A good site to use.
Booking.com
Booking.com is also a company we have used before to get things done. Sometimes their pricing can’t be beat. We found their website and little more difficult to navigate and signup, but overall a great website to find that cheap deal. Also, Booking.com doesn't charge your card until the day before your booking.
AirBNB.com
AirBnB has been something we used more when we needed a place for longer periods of time. We have been nursing in the US and found a great place in Southern California for 3 months. We have used them for other stays as well and feel they are a good choice in many places that are difficult to find hotels or resorts that fit your budget. You can find some real gems on this site all over the world.
HostelWorld.com
Hostel World is not just for hostels. They have some off the beaten path hotels and guesthouses that the bigger sites don’t have. We found a great place in Dharamsala, India off Hostel World for a great price! We have used them a few times and feel that they deserve to be up here with the other sites.
CouchSurfing.com
Couchsurfing.com is not a site we use often, however it’s a great way to connect with local people who live in the area you are traveling to. We have met thousands of people from all over the world who use this service and have had private tours of cities and gone to cultural events such as weddings that they would have never had the chance to do by booking anywhere else. A good choice if you are on a budget.
Flight Booking Websites
This is a list of commonly used websites we use to book flights around the world. Not all the "majors" are necessarily the best or cheapest. Airlines will contract and set certain prices with certain sites. We find that when shopping for airline fares, the difference can be in the hundreds of dollars.
Kayak.com
KAYAK uses a comparison tool to search many carriers (not all) and display the cheapest flights based on your search criteria. The handy thing about Kayak is their +3 -3 (flexible dates) search tool that allows you to see the flights in a grid to find what day is best to leave and come back. You can also search by specific airline if you are a member of an airline alliance, partnership program or rewards member sites in the industry. KAYAK is an airline, rental car, and hotel search engine. It compares all the carriers and sometimes you can book with Kayak, and at times it redirects you to the specific carrier’s site. We have found some discrepancies at times between what Kayak offers and the carrier offers on their website, especially American Airlines.
SkyScanner.com
Skyscanner is a great site and app that we have used when we don’t know where we want to go. There are times when we knew we wanted to go somewhere in a country but, wanted the cheapest flight. This website does this for you by only showing you the cheapest one way legs from one place to another. The website and app are slick and easy to use. We liked that it showed specific days of travel and what day in a whole month is cheapest for that flight. Sometimes with this site we could find one day that the flight was cut in half and book that one. Most bookings are directed to the carrier’s specific site, however we find this site very useful and fun when we don’t know where the next adventure is.
CheapOair.com
CheapOair also allows you to search flexible dates and times for a better chance of saving some money by flying specific days of the week. Airlines generally offer lower rates on specific days of the week and don’t publicize those days. This tool shows you the cheapest day. They also have a great “Handpicked Fares” section and “Under $199” Section that can narrow down your search for the cheapest flight. We have used CheapOair a few times and have saved money from any of the other booking sites.
CheapTickets.com
CheapTickets has a great feature that allows you to pick separate airlines in each leg. This can result in cheaper airfares and save you money. The site is easy to navigate and excellent filters to improve your search results. You can also use this site to search specific airlines only. We are members of airline partnerships such as Star Alliance with United. We found it easier to use our points for specific flights that were advertised cheaper by doing this.
Priceline.com
Priceline is the last option we use. The only reason we use it is when we have plenty of time to use their “Name Your Own Price®” tool. We have used it before for other services and have never had luck using it for airlines, however we know of people who save 30-50% off published airline prices by using this tool. The prices on Priceline are competitive you also have to opportunity with this site to compare with other sites, which is handy. Besides... with William Shatner as their spokesman, it's gotta be a great company!
MakeMyTrip.com
Make My Trip is worth mentioning, but only in India. With MakeMyTrip.com You can plan your flight, and other modes of transportation in India. We found this website useful for shorter local flights around India with local airlines that weren’t searched in the major sites. A very useful tool to find cheap flights around India.
Transportation Apps
This is a list of apps we use to travel the world. We find that apps can be extremely useful for finding your way around. These apps are only for Android as we don't use Iphone or Apple products. I am sure they are also available on the Itunes app store as well.
Uber App
If I could get all the money lost in overpriced and crooked taxi fares in the world, I might be a rich man. While traveling in foreign countries the taxi/ cab fares vary from driver to driver up to 1000 percent. In countries that support Uber, we use them. You never have to worry about what the cost will be and no money is exchanged with the driver which adds on safety. Many places in the world use Uber and we have found it a real money-saver to use them where it’s available.
Waze App
Waze is the world's largest community-based traffic and navigation app with over 6 million downloads and counting. Other drivers on the road share traffic information that’s useful for getting where you want to in the least amount of time. This has been especially useful when driving ourselves wherever we go. The data is much better in the US, Mexico and Central America, however also works in other big cities around the world. Want to know where those police are hiding? This app can save you money by slowing down in those trouble spots. We have logged hundreds of thousands of miles in a vehicle and have used this app to our advantage.
IRCTC App
Indian Railway PNR / IRCTC Is your go to app on the Indian Railway System. When you buy a ticket from IRCTC, you will get a unique 10 digit number called PNR number. This PNR Number is your Passenger Name Record number. The app also allows you to see train schedules in India and know if a train is delayed (very common). We found this app a valuable time saver and a great source of information for booking multiple legs all over the country. The Indian Rail System was overwhelming before finding this app. A must!
Travel Inspiration
Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self-determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.
If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay home.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.
If you’re… physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel – as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them – wherever you go.
Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.
Traveling outgrows its motives. It soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you – or unmaking you.
Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover
Live life with no excuses, travel with no regret.
There is no unhappiness like the misery of sighting land (and work) again after a cheerful, careless voyage.
I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.
If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.
The saddest journey in the world is the one that follows a precise itinerary. Then you’re not a traveler. You’re a f@$%ing tourist.
A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.
Nothing can be compared to the new life that the discovery of another country provides for a thoughtful person. Although I am still the same I believe to have changed to the bones.
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
Travel makes one modest, you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.
Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travellers don’t know where they’re going.
Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you- it should change you.
Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonalds? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria’s mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once.
A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware.
We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey
I travel not to cross countries off a list, but to ignite passionate affairs with destinations.
Better to see something once than hear about it a thousand times.
A man of ordinary talent will always be ordinary, whether he travels or not; but a man of superior talent will go to pieces if he remains forever in the same place.
For the born traveller, travelling is a besetting vice. Like other vices, it is imperious, demanding its victim’s time, money, energy and the sacrifice of comfort.
Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of the experience.
Traveling. It leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.
The journey not the arrival matters.
To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted
The gladdest moment in human life, me thinks, is a departure into unknown lands.
Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you travelled.
I finally felt myself lifted definitively away on the winds of adventure toward worlds I envisaged would be stranger than they were, into situations I imagined would be much more normal than they turned out to be.
To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.
The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.
Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.
Not all those who wander are lost.
I am a passionate traveler, and from the time I was a child, travel formed me as much as my formal education.
There comes a point in your life when you need to stop reading other people’s books and write your own.
Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.
The world is a book and those who do not travel only read one page.
Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
A great way to learn about your country is to leave it.
Experience, travel – these are as education in themselves.
A wise man travels to discover himself.
What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do – especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.
You do not travel if you are afraid of the unknown, you travel for the unknown, that reveals you with yourself.
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”
One’s destination is never a place, but always a new way of seeing things.
Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.
To move, to breathe, to fly, to float, To gain all while you give, To roam the roads of lands remote, To travel is to live.
It’s a funny thing coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same, even smells the same. You realize what’s changed is you.
And then there is the most dangerous risk of all — the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.
Too often. . .I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen.
How you live your life is up to you. You have to go out and grab the world by the horns. Rope it before it ties you down and decides for you.
No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.
Make voyages! Attempt them… there’s nothing else.
NOT I – NOT ANYONE else, can travel that road for you, You must travel it for yourself.
…to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice.
I can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything.
At its best, travel should challenge our preconceptions and most cherished views, cause us to rethink our assumptions, shake us a bit, make us broader minded and more understanding.
Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueler than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet.
I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.
Once you have travelled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.
Reviews and Communication
TripAdvisor
We use Trip Advisor and find it accurate in detailing how good a hotel, or service is around the world. Not so great in the restaurant realm in my opinion. It's the gold standard for review apps and websites. Sometimes hard to navigate however.
Yelp
Bigger in the USA and from what we hear, gaining ground in Europe. This app isn't as reliable as Trip Advisor, but much more restaurant friendly than Trip Advisor. Yelp has a great interface that is easily searchable by restaurant.
MagicApp
We find the Voice-Over-IP calling is excellent and much better than Skype and also has text features. You can get a free US or Canadian number that rings directly to your phone wherever you are in the world. No need for your caller to have an app.
Whatsapp is gaining more and more marketshare in the world of free messaging apps. Voice, video and text makes this a good choice. Excellent VOIP, and very useful in Central America where everyone uses it. Others must have the app to communicate.
Weather and Atmosphere
Weather Underground
WU is our go to for accurate weather wherever we are. There are many world updating stations around the globe that report to the app. It's easy to navigate and shows extended weather for up to a month away.
Intellicast
This is a good weather app, however the real feature I love is that it shows wind patterns and has a great doppler radar section. Full of features however, not the most accurate weather prediction matrix as we find in other apps.
Windfinder
This app is excellent for when you are on an island or near the beach. Wind is the greatest predictor of poor water conditions, and we use this alot when scuba diving around the world to see if it will be a wavy day on the seas. Very useful.
Google Sky
Are you aware that stars and constellations are different all over the world? We love taking this geo-positional app out when we are away from city lights and can really see the cosmos. This app is fun and interesting.
Translation and Translators
Google Translate
The gold standard for translation apps. Many companies use Google's API for their translation applications. Why use anything else? We find it accurate and useful to speak in a foreign country, and the voice modulation is understandable.
Learn Thai Lite
A great application! So much so, I bought the Pro version. With native speakers on the audio portion of the app, you will be understood with phrases around the world. Not only available in Thai they have other languages too. Great product by Codegent Ltd.!
DuoLingo
We have used this app to learn Spanish, Portuguese and some Italian. You can learn any language and has free lessons. An app and a website, makes this a great choice to really learn a language. If you are going to be somewhere a while, learn the language.
Voice Translator
Record what you want to say and the app will translate them into whichever language you choose. If you find yourself face-to-face with someone who speaks a foreign language, you can pass the phone back and forth and communicate.
Money Programs & Currency and Unit Converters
Travel Money
Track your expenses and manage the amount of money spent in a group of people. Good for groups of friends or couples. Runs off one account with multiple phones. It tells you how much each person owes as well when one person pays. Also supports exchange rate conversion on the fly.
Exchange Rates
With over 5 million downloads, they must be doing something right! An easy to use and accurate money exchange calculator and converter. Even shows bank notes from the country you are in. Very useful tool when dealing with money-changers.
UnitConverter
More useful for people from the USA like we are. The same goes for anyone visiting the US and has not idea how many inches are in a yard. Also has a currency exchange rate tab including bitcoin, and many other useful features.
PayPal
PayPal is becoming more and more common in the world. PayPal states it is used in 202 Countries and 25 currencies as of 2017. We find it a safe and useful way to pay for services and goods all over the world.