Tried and Tested - Which Apps We Recommend
India is definitely not behind the times when it comes to using technology - it is the second biggest user of the internet in the world (behind China) with over 460 million users (2018).
We travelled through India for 6 months and tried lots of smartphone apps to make our travel easier or more interesting.
Here’s the ones we recommend, even for people just travelling for a short time. Some of these are specific to India, but most are general travel apps which we love.
And best of all - they are all FREE!
Wally
XE Currency Converter
Maps.Me
Triposo
What's App
IRCTC
Paytm
Ola Cabs
Booking.com
Oyo Hotels
Money
Budgeting is a big thing when travelling. See our blog on Costs of Travelling India
We note every rupee, dollar or pound spent on food & drink, transport, fun, accommodation, alcohol, etc. Each day or week we check our spend against our budget.
A downside of this app is that once you change currency it changes all the currencies historically, so I have also kept a monthly record of spend in a Google spreadsheet.
The app I started off with was Trail Wallet which is a travel-specific app which looks great, but it moves from free to paid after only 12 entries so I quickly found Wally’s free version and think it’s perfect for us.
There are tonnes of exchange rate calculators, but I’ve always found this great. You can select one currency to compare with your home currency; or select multiple currencies. I find this handy when I am travelling in one country but looking at prices in the next place we're visiting to, so you can compare Dollars, Rupees, Renminbi etc. all in one screen.
Maps
Most people know about Google Maps, but I am also a big fan of Maps.me.
The best thing about this map when you’re travelling is it works offline and tracks your route - handy to find your way back to your hotel! While some hotels or restaurants were not entirely accurate on the map, it does have some details Google Maps doesn't, including small footpaths across fields in India. It was fantastic at helping us work out how far away we were from our destination, or if the sleeper train was delayed so we could go back to sleep for a couple of hours! Big fan.
This is my NUMBER ONE app pick for all my travels.
Travel Guides
As we travelled through India the main travel guide we used was Triposo. I wouldn’t say it was perfect, in fact some of the information is downright biased or out of date. It provides places to visit, connections and transport suggestions, facts and figures of tourists sites and food options on menus.
If you just visit main tourist spots there are plenty of other apps, such as Lonely Planet Guides, but I found Triposo to have the widest range of coverage.
Communication
We found What’s App to be the most popular platform to communicate in India. Indians and tourists use it for calls and texts and this meant we could communicate with yoga schools, hotels, other backpackers and Indian friends we made.
Transport & Travel
Travel is cheap in India and (mostly) great fun and I was impressed by how well the trains and buses ran, given the distances. Booking however was another story!
Trains
Train travel was our transport preference - great fun and felt safer than road travel. Chris did all our transport booking for the trip and definitely needed patience!
Booking a train online in India is difficult without an Indian bank card and some apps seemed good for some things, but not the whole process! This is the workaround we used which combines usability and our ability to trust the system; it was also recommended by other backpackers we met….
First step find the train you want, second step book it.
This is the official Indian Railway website and app and you need to register to get a unique identifier to be able to buy train tickets - it links tickets to your passport. You are supposed to have an Indian phone number for this (super cheap, or ask an Indian resident eg in your hotel) and you can use your hotel as your address.
Set this up in advance of booking a train ticket.
Finding train info was good on this app if you wanted to go from point A to point B on a route, but not if you wanted to change trains mid-journey. Booking on this can be really difficult.
2. Find your train
Chris found a range of places to search for train times, routes and, most importantly, train numbers. He searched different platforms to ensure the information was accurate, especially if we were looking to change trains mid-journey: IRTCTC, Indian Railways, Ixigo, Paytm, Maps.me, Google maps and on the train boards in the stations.
3. Book & Pay - Paytm
This is the Indian equivalent of PayPal and is a general payment app, not just for trains. You can also use it to pay for for movies, flights, food…
It initially asks you to load credit to the app - you don't need to as you can use your credit card to make payments. Be aware - sometimes you might need to try a couple of times before it completes the transaction.
Also worth noting is Ixigo. This app had the best interface for searching and booking trains so should have been our ‘go-to’ app, however having our credit card scammed on this app meant we used it for searching only, not payment.
With all that complication - it has to be said we NEVER failed to get the trains we wanted, the big stations all had excellent free WiFi to check train progress and the onboard guards were really helpful.
Ola / Uber
In cities we generally walked or used local ‘autos’ (auto-rickshaws/tuk tuks), but on some occasions used Ola Cabs, the Indian version of Uber. Both companies operate throughout India, but we found Ola to be more ubiquitous than Uber.
A sneaky trick when you arrive in a new city is to use the app to give an estimate of the cost from the train station to your hotel and then use this to base your bartering when approached by a taxi or auto driver. There's no standard fare structure from city to city and it is sometimes quite overwhelming when you first arrive in a new destination!
What we also liked about Ola was that the app gave options from limousines and mini-buses, through to taxis, motorbikes and auto-rickshaws.
A couple of times we travelled by bus and found Red Bus had a good range of bus times / operators and a user-friendly interface.
Rome to Rio is a global travel app. We didn’t use it to book anything, but it was a useful tool to identify if there was a route from A to B!
Accommodation
I did all the accommodation booking during the trip and mainly used global apps which have apps and websites. My go-to sites were...
Booking.com which is a global accommodation platform and Oyo, which is an Indian hotel brand of independent hotels. I call Oyo the ‘McDonald’s of hotels’ in that their aim is to provide a consistent offering at every location. Having travelled from India to the UK it’s interesting to see they have just expanded their offering to the UK too, so I expect to see this spread continue. The hotels became a bit ‘samey’ after a while with limited ‘character’, but broadly good and clean with aircon, ensuite, free WiFi and were exactly what we wanted.
I occasionally used Hostelworld to find hostels in the more expensive areas and we also stayed in a couple of AirBnBs but they tended to be slightly above our budget so I didn’t use these apps as much.
News
When I travel I like to understand what’s going on in an area, language allowing. In India I downloaded two different news media apps as I wanted to ensure I saw different perspectives. It’s not just in India that news is biased, but I certainly did notice a large amount of rhetoric, especially as we travelled during their general election.
The two I used were the Times of India and The Hindu News
Also mentions…
A couple of other apps we occasionally used:
Food Delivery is everywhere in India, with stickers advertising Zomato, Uber Eats, Swiggy etc. everywhere…. in restaurants and hotel lobbies. We only used this once when we were in a hotel that had a slightly long walk back into the centre.
Google Translate - you’d think we would use this loads, but English is so widely spoken in India we really only used it to look up spurious signs, such as the Ghandi glasses on the side of trains which was to tell everyone to keep the railways clean!
Sounds like a lot of apps, but with super cheap SIM cards and free WiFi available at all our hotels and at the railway stations we really found they made our lives a lot easier.
Global Gumboots - Chris and Helen are two 40+ year olds who decided to 'live life today' and travel the world while we are young enough to enjoy it! Originally from the UK, our home has been NZ for 15 years. At the start of 2019 we set off on a big “OE” (Kiwi phrase - Overseas Experience) and spent 6 months travelling through India - from the very southern tip to the Himalayas in the North. Following an unexpected spell of time in the UK we've bought a camper van and are travelling through Europe.
We’ve been documenting our travels and the things we have learned as Global Gumboots - you can follow us on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and through our blogs.
We'd love to hear from you.