The Top 8 Business Travel Apps for 2017

There’s no dearth of travel apps available to help consumers book, manage and enjoy their trips. Yet business travelers have different needs: primarily, we have to be extremely organized so as to avoid missing connections and meetings, along with staying productive on the road. As a software CEO, I travel roughly 40% of the time. Here are some apps that I use frequently to manage travel – and stress – when I leave town for work.

1. TripCase. This is a great tool for the occasional or frequent business traveler, because you can organize all the steps of your trip in one place. You forward confirmation emails from airlines, car rental companies, hotels, restaurants and any other travel providers to an email address. The company also has relationships with travel providers, including all the major airlines, so that your reservations automatically import into the app. I also like the app’s travel communications feature. That means you can share updates with fellow travelers, such as if a meeting place has changed.
2. Flight Tracker. Even if you’re not an aviation junkie, it’s cool to look up a flight in real time as it travels to its destination. FlightTracker is a boon when you’re coordinating pickups of business colleagues or to see if they’ll be on time for your meeting. If your flight’s been canceled, you can look up the best option for rebooking. That saves a heap of time working with an agent; the app does not allow you to rebook directly but you can do all the pre-work a lot faster. Where I live in Portland, Maine, the airport closes frequently in the winter due to severe weather conditions. I use this app to rebook my flight into Boston when needed. It saves me time and stress, and helps me get home faster.
3. Gate Guru. This tool is all about navigating airports; if you fly frequently to many different cities, it’s quite handy. Gate Guru shows you amenities like shops and restaurants, provides updates on flight status and gate changes, estimated TSA wait times and other useful tidbits.
4. Lounge Buddy. I love airport lounges, and not because I feel the need to be pampered. In an airport lounge, I can actually get some work done in a quiet area with reliable and fast WiFi. This app allows you to enter your airline preferences, frequent flyer programs and lounge memberships or discounts through credit cards like American Express. Once you arrive at your destination, the app will tell you the location of the closest lounge you can access or help you purchase access to lounges where you don’t already have benefits.
5. Uber. Yes, we all know about the many advantages of Uber, yet the company recently unveiled a new feature that’s perfect for business travelers. It’s called scheduled rides. The service allows you to pre-book a ride at a specific time and place. When you have a 6am flight, the last thing you want to do is to wait 20 minutes for the Uber driver to show up.

6. XECurrency. Even if you’re good at numbers, it’s just a pain to calculate currency conversions on-the-fly when you’re trying to find a place to eat or buy a gift for your spouse. This app does it for you, and stores the last updated rates so it works even when the Internet doesn’t.
7. OpenTable. This website and app have been around for a while, but it’s still one of the best tools out there for quickly making a reservation from a large choice of restaurants. When you’re traveling, it’s nice to have an easy tool to book a table, receive reminders and make a change to a reservation from your phone.
8. Certify. The mobile expense management and travel app from Certify makes it extremely simple to record and manage business expenses on the road. The app allows travelers to take a picture of a receipt, and then let the app do all the work by automatically creating an expense report during your trip. The app also provides real-time policy compliance feedback—so you know if the meal you just charged is too high or if the hotel you want to book isn’t a preferred vendor. CFOs love this stuff.