The phone in your pocket replaced a guidebook, a map, a phrasebook, a currency converter and a folder of printouts, which is genuinely useful right up until the signal drops and it replaces none of them. The apps that make traveling abroad easier are not the ones with the best reviews — they are the ones that still work when you are standing in an unfamiliar station with no data.
Almost everything below depends on preparation you do at home, on a connection you trust. Downloading a map at the airport on a weak signal, or discovering a login needs a code sent to a number you cannot receive, is the common way this falls apart.
An hour the night before covers it: install, log in, download the offline content, and check each one opens with the phone in airplane mode. That last test is the one people skip and the one that matters.
Before you leave the house, put the phone into airplane mode and open each app in turn. Can you find your accommodation on the map? Does the translator work on a photo? Are your tickets visible?
Anything that fails that test is not a travel app, whatever the description says. It is a five-minute check that has saved a great many people from standing outside a closed station at eleven at night, and it is the step most travel app roundups never mention because it is not exciting.
Resist installing eight new things the week before a trip. Unfamiliar tools under pressure in an unfamiliar place is the opposite of helpful, and most of them will be uninstalled a couple of weeks after you get home.
Specifically unnecessary for most trips: separate apps for each airline if you can use the website, trip-planning tools that duplicate a notes app, and anything requiring an account and a subscription for something your phone already does. The travel tools that survive more than one trip tend to be boring and few.
Two things are worth keeping in mind. First, battery: offline maps and camera translation are demanding, and a power bank is more useful abroad than any individual app. Second, public wi-fi: fine for browsing, worth avoiding for banking, and worth being careful about when a network name is nearly right but not quite — a point covered properly in guides to staying safe online.
It is also sensible to keep one paper backup — the accommodation address written down. Phones are lost, dropped and drained, and a written address gets you home when none of this works.
Download the offline map and the language pack, save your documents somewhere that opens without a connection, find the local transit app for the city you are visiting, agree a messaging app with home, and test every one of them in airplane mode before you pack. Do that and the phone does replace the guidebook, including on the day the signal does not cooperate.
Before the next trip, take five minutes with FactMates.
