Even more Android travel apps and sites

Not long ago I wrote a post detailing four Android travel apps I found useful. Of course, there are dozens of travel apps on Android, so a few commenters raised objections. In that spirit, I thought we could take just a few minutes to look over a few things they suggested — and a few items people mailed in. OnTheFly One reader suggested that OnTheFly is a better solution than Orbitz. That makes enough sense, since the developer of OnTheFly, ITA Software, is owned by Google. The app does pull from many resources to find the best flight prices within any given parameters. The app interface is second to none — plenty of competitors could learn a lot by how smoothly it runs through the process. And it does provide you with a comprehensive list of flights, allowing you to find the cheapest. The only problem is that it doesn’t allow you to book those flights right from the app. Once it adds that, and tweaks a few features, it will certainly be a go-to app. But until then, apps with poorer UIs will win out, since users can book right from the app. KAYAK Not sure how this one didn’t make the original list. Just a few years ago Kayak was just some small upstart. In the following years it became one of the biggest and best online travel tools. I remember a few years ago when the app debuted for BlackBerry. It was revolutionary at the time, and it has only gotten better since. And yes, you can book your accommodations right from the app. Not only does it search for the best deals and let you book accommodations right from the app, but it also stores your itinerary. That’s what sets it apart from apps such as TripIt and Worldmate, since they only store the data. That’s fine if you book from a computer. But if you’re booking from your mobile Kayak is your one-stop destination. Add into that neat features, such as map-based hotel plotting, and it’s definitely a winner. It’s not easy for apps to maintain high ratings as they get thousands upon thousands of reviews. Yet Kayak has maintained 4.5 stars through almost 25,000 reviews. You can get Kayak for free at the Google M…er, I mean, Google Play. Cheap Tickets Surprisingly, Cheap Tickets does not have a mobile app. At a time when seemingly every commercial website has one, they’ve refrained. In one way, that has to be a mistake. Mobile apps increase engagement among users. Many, many people are more apt to download an app for a service than visit it on the web. But Cheap Tickets seems to know that people don’t regularly book travel from their phones. As such, they forewent the app development and instead created a pristine mobile website. As with all good mobile websites, you needn’t type in a special address. If you needed to visit m.cheaptickets.com, that might be an issue. Instead, you can just go to cheaptickets.com as you would normally, and it brings up the mobile web interface. You can choose to use the desktop site if that’s your thing, but the mobile website is so good that you probably won’t want to. From there you can do everything you can on normal travel sites: search and book cheap flights, find hotel deals, and combine them with a rental car for even more savings. Again, that’s just a click over to cheaptickets.com. No downloading, no app installation, and no updates. There’s something reassuring about that kind of simplicity.

About the Author

Joe Pawlikowski is the Senior Editor at MobileMoo.com and has been covering the mobile industry full time since 2007. When he's not writing about the tech scene, he can be found discussing his personal love - baseball (and more specifically the New York Yankees) as well as writing on his personal blog.