The important tools you need

I use a couple of websites and apps regularly on my trips. This is a page to show you the best of these. All based on my own experience, and I am not getting any money for that 🙂

I recommend coming back frequently as I will add new tools continually.

Telecommunication

First, I recommend staying on your mobile contract at home, even if you are away for a long time. Occasionally, your local number at home might be used; for me, it’s my Amazon account or my bank account if they want to check if it’s me logging in.

But for sure, you need mobile data while traveling. I use two providers for that: flexiroam.com and maya.net/shop

Both are e-sim providers you can easily install on your mobile phone without any software. Flexiroam I use as Lufthansa Credit Card holders to get three times 1 GB for free during a calendar year. Maya, I used it for the rest of the time. The charming part of Maya is that you can buy continent e-sims, not for countries. As I was traveling a lot in South America, I bought “30 days LTE South America”, which means it doesn’t matter which country. They also have an “auto-renew” feature in case your volume (1 GB up to unlimited) or your time is over. The prices are excellent and might only get beaten by local SIM card providers bound to the country and not used in other countries.

Flying

I guess skyscanner.com is not a secret anymore. The best prices are served there. Two remarks on that website:

• The prices are sometimes, especially for cheap airlines, not correct. After you open the website offering the price, it adds tax, luggage, and breathing air to it… It’s worth looking at the 2nd lowest price as you might end up better…
• Websites like kiwi.com are offering flight combinations with different airlines. That might end up in horror as Kiwi is not giving any support. Imagine you are planning a round trip with two flights in each direction, meaning four flights in total. You might end up with 2 or 3 different airlines. Kiwi (and I made this experience) is only booking the flight. You have to find out how to check in and the luggage policy, and if you have problems with the flight, you have to get to the airline directly. I will never pick companies like Kiwi; I would spend ten bucks more for booking at the airline directly. 

New for me was the website flightconnections.com. Especially on a world trip, where you are flexible and have no clue what you should be doing next, you can click on an airport to find out which other airports are connected and reachable via one flight. It inspired me about my flight route and destroyed other plans as I needed help finding a good way around from A to B.