What I Use: International Travel Apps and Services (Premium)

It's been a few years since I last documented the mobile apps and services that I rely on while traveling internationally. So here's an updated and expanded peek at what I really use.

And this should remain pretty consistent across the three international trips for which I'm currently booked for the remainder of 2018: The current home swap, in Stockholm Sweden, with a side trip to Berlin, plus Paris and then Dublin in October.

One of the interesting things, for me, anyway, is looking back over my previous "What I Use" posts and seeing how things have changed over the years. The basics, from the way I travel, pack, prepare, and the gadgets and other physical items I bring, has evolved, but have generally remained consistent. But thanks to the rapid explosion of mobile and cloud technologies, my use of apps and services is markedly different than it was when we did our first home swap way back in 2006.

Back then, "mobile" wasn't really a thing: We had cell phones, or what passed as smartphones for the day. But they would not work in Europe, and we didn't bother trying. Instead, my wife had purchased me an international-capable candy bar phone---a silver Nokia, I believe---with the idea being that we'd buy a SIM at each destination and use it for that one trip.

I don't recall how well that worked in Paris in 2006, though I do remember a few screw-ups, like the time my wife and kids stayed in the city when I went back to the home swap house to work but had forgotten the keys: We had no way to contact each other, and realizing my mistake on the Metro, I got off where I knew there would be an Internet cafe and just worked from there. How we ended up meeting later is too hazy to call it a memory. But this is the type of thing that would never happen today: All of us, my wife, my kids, and I, have smartphones and everyone can be easily reached.

By the time we performed our second home swap in 2007, also in Paris, the first iPhone had been released, so I brought it with me. But I was scared to death to turn on the cellular capabilities: That first iPhone didn't have a way to turn off roaming, and I had heard horror stories of people coming back from Europe with bills in the thousands of dollars. And AT&T had terrible international plans that were designed for a previous generation of non-smart phones. My iPhone was a curiosity, as it was only sold in the U.S. (and via AT&T) at that time. But I was afraid to even use it.

In 2010, I brought the first prototype Windows phone, the Samsung Taylor, to Germany on a home swap. But a more notable milestone, I think, happened in 2013, when I brought the Nokia Lumia 1020 along for our home swap in Amsterdam: That year, for the first time, I relied solely on a smartphone for our family trip photos, and the results were stunning. That was the last year I ever used a digital camera, and a rotating series of Windows phones, iPhones, and Google-branded Android handsets have been respo...