Before starting your next travel journey across India, you must download best travel apps in India on your smartphone. These most useful travel apps will help to make your journey relaxing.
India with its mountain of landscape, numerous heritage sites and a hub for cultural importance offers a myriad of tourist destinations. However, this diverse nature can be overwhelming if not planned properly. Planning your trip is the key point to get the best experience and avoid any unnecessary hassle while in India.
In the modern era of technology, India developed tremendously and offers a range of travel apps for assisting you in your travel and making your holidays comfortable. Hold onto your smartphones, because they are gonna be handy while travelling.
Most Useful Travel Apps in India for Travelers
Below are the best travel apps for your tour in India. You must have these travel apps for your ease to manage everything from ticket booking, hotel booking, find locations, hire car, mange your budget and more other things.
Incredible India
Incredible India app was launched in 2014 with the idea of developing international and domestic tourism in India. The app revolves around providing tourists with cultural and holistic events and experience. This innovative app provides you with all the things you need to know about popular heritage sites, places to eat around the sightseeing and hotels to check in.
You can get to know more about the popular sights as it provides facts about the cities and its culture. Incredible India is like your own personal guide at your fingertips.
The extended service of this app is Incredible India Calendar, it provides you with all the important festivals and cultural events all over India. You can mark and customize the reminder for these events. With all the features of a digital calendar, it uses your location to provide you with accurate information.
Aarogya Setu
Safety comes first, keeping this in mind the Indian government developed the Aarogya Setu to deal with the pandemic.
During world spread contamination of Covid-19 , many places need you to register with the Aarogya setu app before entering inside. You need to provide your contact information based on which this app determines your location and any other infected person. Notifications over bluetooth are sent to the user about the information of any infected person or region.
The app is easy to use and made accessible to the public by giving the option of language to choose from. You can choose from English, Hindi and all the other languages that are spoken in India.
Prevention is always better than cure, keeping this app on your smartphone is crucial while travelling in India.
Google Maps
Google Maps is a well known app and needs no introduction when it comes to GPS. A must have for navigating around without stopping at a pan shop to ask for directions.
Apart from navigation it provides you with different routes and the time to reach the destination. The real time traffic updates help you avoid the traffic jam on the busy roads of India.
It gives you an accurate route and ETA (Estimated Time of Arrival), depending on the mode of transport you are taking. The information on the public transport to reach the destination is also available.
You can even customize it by entering your location and entering detour options. Google provides you with the available outlets near you like Atm, hospitals, restaurants etc.
It is advisable to download an offline area map beforehand if you are going somewhere with connectivity issues.
AccuWeather
A planned trip’s nightmare would be incompatible weather. To avoid sudden downpour or any other dismaying weather condition AccuWeather gives you detailed weather information. The trip can be planned after taking in the weather condition of the destination.
AccuWeather is the best app for knowing the projection and prediction of any area in the world. The predictions related to climate change provided by the app are mostly accurate. You can check for any irregularity in weather according to the time in hours, days or weeks. It also shows humidity and speed of the wind in the region.
The detailed information on Air Quality Index is also available as per the region. The weather news section tackles any and every sudden climatic change all over the world.
IRCTC Connect and Railyatri
The Railways are lifesavers in India when it comes to value for money. Almost all the cities and tourist spots are well connected with the railways in India. The official app of Indian Railways offers IRCTC rail connect app for booking your tickets online. This app answers all of your queries from the PNR status to the availability of seats. You can even change your boarding point and check the train route. The tatkal booking of the tickets can also be done through IRCTC.
Railyatri is another extended service provided by the official partner of IRCTC which helps users to make informed decisions. It shows the real time updates of your train like where is your train right now, updated confirmation information and PNR status. You can order food online and it will get delivered at one of the stations or book UPSRTC/private Volvo bus tickets for intercity travelling.
Ola/Uber
Whether you want to travel intracity or intercity, Ola and Uber both provide transport service for you to travel even where buses are not available. You just need to enter the pickup and destination details and you will be ping with an OTP, after that the driver will pick you up and ask for the said OTP. The purpose of the OTP is to help ensure you are billed right and hence avoid getting scammed. This option is best if you are in a hurry and want to reach the destination quickly without any hassle.
The option of shared cabs is also available to cut back on the cost of fare. You can book a cab, bike or even auto rickshaw in a few cities. Want to ride in luxury? No problem, these cab providers also have high-end cars like Mercedes, BMW and Audi for rental. Last but not the least, you can opt to pay in cash or any type of online payment.
Airbnb
The prime focus of Airbnb is to make you feel at home after a tiresome adventurous day on your trip. They provide accommodation services all over the world.
The local hosts connect to Airbnb to rent the place and you can contact the host for any issues.
You can even rent the entire house for a month and just rejuvenate on your getaway with your family and friends.
The option of shared rooms is also available which is comparatively less expensive. With installed CCTV around the place in a shared room, security is not among one of the concerns.
They have a range of places like cabins, villas, shared rooms and hotel rooms for you to choose from.
This app is made keeping in mind the comfort of the user while they work, relax and travel. You can find unique getaways, outdoor staying options and pet friendly rooms for your staycation.
MakeMyTrip
MakeMyTrip can be considered as a one-stop solution for arranging your trip. The online travel services company offers hotel and train booking, tour plans and packages, reservation for train and buses. It compares all the reviews and costs from different service providers and lets you make a plan for yourself.
It offers cheap international and domestic flight booking by comparing different air services. You can pay securely with the payment options of Net banking, credit/debit card and UPI.
For accommodation it offers wide range options like homestays, villa, resorts and villa. You can avail discounts on the booking if there is any and get the best deals. If you are planning a day trip or tour you can even book fun activities to do on your trip with this app.
MakeMyTrip is also used by many travel guides and agencies to plan the tour.
Google Pay/Paytm
There is a possibility of running out of cash sometimes while travelling, having any of the payment wallets like Paytm, Google pay or even PhonePe can save you the trouble of running to the atm.
Paytm, a product of India, is the most commonly used payment gateway in the last few years in India. You will find even the small corner shop with the QR code of payment as an acceptable way of payable. One of the useful features of these apps is UPI payment, you can directly pay any bills directly through your connected bank.
You can recharge your mobile at any point of time while travelling with these apps or even pay your bills. The cab fares or any other shopping you do for your souvenirs can be paid by any of these apps making it one of the important applications on your outing.
TravelSpend
TravelSpend analysis and combine all your expenses on the tour to give you a budget friendly experience. One of the important things while travelling is how to manage your expenditure. You can track your budget as you go along the route after adding your expenses. It will show the history of all expenses and the limit to which you can expend your budget. You just need to feed it with some simple queries to make your customized plan.
It gives you helpful insights like how much you can spend on an average per day and the total amount spent already. You can even sync your real time data with your family and friends to help you organize your budget easily. Another feature of splitting the cost keeps track of all the debts and expenses. Lastly, you can link it with a map to see all the places where the money was spent.
The above list curates only the best and trusted travel apps in India among the vast source of applications available. This is to help you have only the best of experience without any trouble.
My name is Himansh Gupta, content writer at BanBanjara. I have done my Bachelor of Engineering at a Mumbai University affiliated College. The skill set section of my resume says, I am a techie with a knack for creating content. Among other things, skating is another hobby of mine. I am still enthusiastically grabbing on any other skills that would make me a great writer.
