Author: Justin Sablich / Source: New York Times
Have you ever just shown up at an airport without a clear travel plan? If your lifestyle allows for that sort of a lack of planning, but you’d rather ease into such a spontaneous adventure, there are several phone apps that can make unplanned travel feel less risky and more affordable.
While travelers have long been able to set up airfare alerts using Google Flights, Skyscanner, Kayak and a host of other web-based tools, the following apps go a step further in helping budget-conscious people who want to go somewhere but don’t know (or care) where.
Hopper
Within the Hopper app there is a feature — once referred to as Flex Watch but now integrated into the Hopper app’s main functionality — which, as the original name suggests, aims to help those with flexible travel dates or destinations as well as spontaneous travelers.
You have the option to search for airfare of a specific destination, or you can tap on the box that asks “Flexible?” From there, simply choose your time frame (either “anytime” or any range up to 10 months in advance) and a length range (somewhere between a weekend and two weeks). You then set your home city; your destination can be either a specific city or “Anywhere.”
I first tried the former option using a theoretical long-weekend trip from New York to Chicago. After setting the appropriate parameters, Hopper gave me the most affordable options. In this case, round-trip airfare from New York to Chicago for March 1 to 5 was available for $112. Scrolling further down led me to a chart showing which months of the year are the least and most expensive for this route.
(It turned out that March is the second cheapest month to travel from New York to Chicago.)I also tried the “Flexible?” option to see what it could offer me from my home base of New York. It provided a range of trips of varying length available…
The post Smartphone Apps for Spontaneous Travel appeared first on FeedBox.