Long plane flights can suck the life out of even the most experienced traveler. Without good in-flight entertainment to keep one’s eyes glued to, travelers are often reduced to reading cheap books they picked up at the airport or the airline magazine. To make matters worse, there is generally no Internet available on planes, meaning that smartphone owners have to keep their gadgets in their pockets. Thankfully, a number of ingenious iPhone app developers have created apps just for people who are not sufficiently entertained by airline magazine articles on where Barbra Streisand likes to eat when she’s in Terre Haute. Check out these three fantastic offline apps that will make your next long haul flight easier to bear.
World Travel Guide Offline
For those looking to brush up on their Spanish before touching down in Mexico or those travelers who hadn’t yet booked a hotel before hopping onto a plane, World Travel Guide Offline is a godsend. The app contains comprehensive information on almost 20,000 travel destinations across the globe, and does not require an Internet connection to function. The app features itineraries other travelers have tried and enjoyed, phrasebooks for many widely spoken languages, information on transportation and dining as well as much more. The app is not free but it is well worth the $3.99 price – it will keep you entertained for hours while on a long plane ride.
World Lens
Menus, signs and warnings are all essential information to travelers, and if you don’t speak the language of the country you have traveled to, getting by will be quite difficult. On airlines based in other countries, for example, the airline magazine might be in a different language. However, World Lens makes translating certain pieces of written information into English much easier. All you have to do is download the app (it costs $9.99), point your iPhone’s camera at the writing you would like to translate, and the app will do all the work for you. The benefit of using this app over a dictionary is that it takes far less time to translate large pieces of text using this app. It’s also offline, meaning that no network connection is required – this means that you can spend as long as you want poring over that airline magazine in Arabic!
Spotted by Locals
Spotted by Locals is a travel guide app that works in a similar way to World Travel Guide Offline, but with a twist. Instead of containing information about tourist attractions in each European city features, Spotted by Locals has a comprehensive database of ‘off the beaten track’ eateries and galleries that you’d have to be a local to know about.
Traveling abroad can be an exciting experience, but unfortunately there is generally a long plane flight on both ends of an overseas holiday. Make use of your time in the sky by finding out more about where you will be traveling and brushing up a little on the language of the country you will be visiting!
