We all love apps that simplify and make your travel easier. As both phones and connectivity (5G) get better, we are seeing a rapid development of travel apps that will change how people book, manage and go through their travel. In this post, we cover 5 flight apps that we recommend watching out for 2023, packed with a ton of features you’ll love.
Table of Contents
5 best flight apps for 2023:
1. Kayak
Kayak is a travel search engine that has been around for several years (competing with Google Flights and others). Its focus is quick research and showing you the best travel options and alternatives to the destinations you would like to go to. Kayak will help you find the best prices and travel times for flights, hotels, apartments, cruises, trains, rental cars, and even vacation packages.
Kayak is part of the Priceline group, so it uses the same backend search technology as Booking.com, and RentalCars.com. It’s likely that you see similar results (though the website looks cleaner and nicer).
The part I love the most about Kayak is its mobile app. Even if you’ve made your reservations somewhere else, you can forward your bookings to trips@kayak.com (or connect your inbox), and they will automatically add your reservation to their trips planner. In there you can have all the info you need at hand, and the app updates you on flight status, gate changes, and other information in real time. It’s so handy! Totally recommended for people who love having everything organized in a single place. It gives plenty of peace of mind.
Finally, you can also join Kayak’s email list and save up to 35% with their Private Deals.
2. Hopper
Believe it or not, Hopper is the #1 most downloaded travel app in North America! They aspire to be the world’s best and most fun app to book travel.
Hopper notifies you of super-low rates on hotels, flights, and car rentals. It also predicts the prices of flights and references you if you are below, on par, or above average prices. Many of the deals save you up to 40% on travel costs! The app is super simple to use and when I started using it, it was only for flights. Now they have grown into a whole technology stack that they call Hopper Cloud.
Hopper sells over $4.5 billion of travel every year, raising over $600 million of private capital, and are backed by some of the world’s largest institutional investors and banks.
The part I love about hopper is that every time you book through them, they plant 2 trees for free on your behalf to help offset the carbon footprint of your travel as part of our Hopper Trees program.
3. Flighty
Flighty is a new flight tracker designed for passengers. It’s the most elegant flight tracker I’ve seen so far. The app was launched in 2019 by Ryan Jones and a global team of developers, and it was named an Editor’s Choice app by Apple within days of launch.
Flighty is beautifully and seamlessly designed to display key flight details. It shows just the right amount of information, and that’s why Flighty is loved by passengers and pilots alike.
Flighty automatically ingests your future and historical flights from your calendar. A passenger’s flights are displayed on the very first screen, informing you of how many days away from travel you are.
The app intelligently transitions through 15 distinct stages of a travel day to show only exactly what you need at each step:
- Countdown to your trip (up to 365 days in advance)
- On day 10, the weather outlook is added
- At 24 hours, your booking code for check-in
- Live tracking begins, showing delays and your gate number
- During boarding time, see your seat number
- Progress bar while in flight
- Arrival gate and baggage claim upon landing
- It also can show a friend or family member’s flight details at a glance.
4. WayAway
WayAway is the best way to find cheap flights and get cashback. WayAway is a flight aggregator that claims to give travelers the best rates on airline tickets and other travel deals.
WayAway also has something called a Plus Membership Plan. If you subscribe to the WayAway Plus membership, you can cashback on flights, accommodation, tours, and more.
The cashback is immediate and you can get it back via PayPal, or use it to offset your carbon footprint.
I did a few comparisons in this post of using WayAway vs. Google Flights and show how you can save up to $480 USD (on those business class flights) by using WayAway.
In addition to using their website to search for cheap flights, you can also download the WayAway app on the App Store or Google Play.
5. Google Travel
Google Travel is a trip planning app that most people don’t know about, and that you can use to plan and organize your trip in a straightforward and smooth way; similar to Kayak, but owned by Google.
Google Travel can help you with different parts of your trip planning, whether it is finding airline tickets, hotel reservations, car rentals, places to visit, restaurants, and more. You will find hundreds of apps and digital products catering to each of these areas.
Google Travel syncs up with your Gmail account. On connecting your Gmail account with the app, it automatically picks up all the reservations/booking emails ever since you created the Gmail account and neatly organizes them under different trips you’ve taken in the past or are planning to make in the future.
It also gives you the opportunity to create Day Plans in a straightforward way. This helps a lot if you are a first time visitor to a city or you want to discover new places around. For now, it is not integrated with Google Flights or Google Hotels, and there’s no mobile app. But still, it is completely free and it lets you do a lot on the Desktop version.
Takeaways – Best 5 flight apps for 2023
Technology is improving and the big players in the market are improving their flight apps using AI for precision and improved UX/UI the get better conversions from users. Way-Away is putting an emphasis on cash back for price sensitive clients. And some of these flight apps are also putting an emphasis on sustainable travel offesting themselves or offering to buy offsets. A good selection to choose from for before your next flight.
