Planning a vacation? MakeMyTrip to Oyo, the must-have travel apps

TripAdvisor 

TripAdvisor uses your current location to show hotels, restaurants and holiday rentals around you and whether bookings can be done. Plus you can see nearby popular cities and airports. The UI is easy to navigate and you will pretty much find every restaurant or hotel, across a variety of budget range.

My favourite feature, however is the ‘Things to Do’ option. For most of us, the challenge lies not in travelling but in finding things to do in a new city. In my case, TripAdvisor, surprised me with a detailed list of ‘Things to Do’ nearby in Noida, where I’ve lived since childhood.

The app does a decent job of showing places to visit, be it malls, temples and other sightseeing locations.  You can also change the settings and select from a list of categories like ‘Spas and Wellness’, ‘Amusement Parks’, ‘Outdoor Activities’ etc. TripAdvisor shows locations with map and Uber availability.

Another good thing about TripAdvisor is that you can pre-download maps to use them later, even without an Internet connection. Maps from over 300 cities including New York, Tokyo, Paris, Rome, Prague can be downloaded.

Then it also has a ‘Telegram’ service, a modern way to send telegram to your loved ones. You can click pictures, doodleon the back and send them to whoever you want to through email. You can also upload pictures on TripAdvisor and write reviews about places you’ve been to, in order to help others make up their mind.

TripAdvisor lets customers book flight tickets as well.

MakeMyTrip 

MakeMyTrip’s app has a strong visual appeal to it. The app’s crucial feature would be the all-round holiday packages it offers, both for travel within India and abroad. The packages comes with a detailed itinerary of your tour, which many Indian families will appreciate.

On the landing page, the app displays special deals and discounts on hotels, flights and holiday packages. Currently the app has has discounts as high as 65 per cent off on hotels and flat Rs 10,000 off on Bhutan holiday packages. With MakeMyTrip, you can also book railway and bus tickets and keep a track of PNR status of your bookings.

The app offers different packages. according to seasons. For example, it has destination packages titled ‘Winter Escapes’, which includes trips to Kashmir, North-East or Rajasthan. Similarly, one can avail packages depending on the number of people and budget from ‘Alluring Asia’, which includes trips to Singapore, Dubai, Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur.

MakeMyTrip also has its own mobile wallet.

OYO Rooms 

Finding a cheap accommodation with good facilities is a painstaking task. Especially, if you are young and travelling with your friends on a tight budget, you would like to live in rooms which are spacious and offer decent services. This is where OYO Rooms come in. These have gained popularity and suddenly I see these bright red OYO room boards at short distances in Delhi/NCR.

While OYO Rooms may not provide users with the luxuries of 5-star hotels, they offer well-worth their prices and more. These rooms are in fact really popular among my friends as they are easy to find and cheap. And after a late-night party, if you don’t feel like heading home, these rooms seem to be a safe bet to spend the rest of time until morning.

OYO rooms are everywhere and I mean it. Just try entering your location and the app will show you at least 4-5 rooms within 2km or 3km range. You can also filter your search based on number of people, distance, budget, amenities and women’s exclusive. These women’s exclusive rooms are basically run by women staff only. OYO however has only limited options for women exclusive rooms available. One can get a OYO room for as low as Rs 799.

OYO Rooms basically gives you a home-like feel without the premium hotels service frills. They are available in many popular cities Delhi, Bangalore, Jamshedpur, Guwahati, Kolkata, Lucknow etc.

Airbnb

While we earlier talked about OYO Rooms being home-like, Airbnb offers rooms in actual homes with common people as hosts. These rooms are very popular among tourists it helps them get a sense of the culture of a place. Also, Airbnb rooms are not very expensive.

Airbnb’s big advantage is that this is a global app so if you’re considering travel abroad, this is a good idea. Plus AirBnb also links to boutique hotels, which offer good quality service but at mid-budget prices.

Anyone, who has a verified phone number can be a host on Airbnb, which had raised security concerns but then there are user ratings and pictures of the host/house registered on the app. The only problem that I see here is that many users do not post the actual pictures of their place, which can be misleading.

The advantage of Airbnb rooms is that you can stay in places of your choice even if there’s no hotel available there. Prices depend on the location and facilities provided by the host or family. The hosts may choose to cook for the guest or just list their place without the meals facility.

Thereafter, people can post their reviews depending upon their experience to help find other users better rooms. Most of the reviews that I came across talked about how warm the hosts were or how delicious the food was.

Expedia 

Expedia is similar to MakeMyTrip except that it does not offer exclusive holiday packages. It basically lists hotels and other accommodation places including OYO Rooms with discounts on them.

I could not book flight tickets from my phones as the app said that ‘mobile flight booking is not yet available in my location’. I could do the same from the Expedia website, which showed me the required flight details with discounts. It also has an ‘Activities’ section which can be used to search for holiday activities in the vicinity.

It however failed to show me any activities even when I switched dates and made my search as broad as ‘Delhi and vicinity’ and ‘Bengaluru and vicinity’. This is disappointing especially because I know of so many events going on in Delhi right now.

Also, while the website offers options to rent cars to travel across cities, the mobile app doesn’t. Expedia still needs to revamp its mobile platform to make its app more useful for customers.