If you follow me on Facebook, you’ll have seen me sharing about spending three weeks in France > Germany > Italy > Spain > Greece > Dubai.
Here are the apps I used while in Europe and Dubai for travel, food, and entertainment.
Table of Contents
Airlines
We flew Delta One from Utah to France.
But once there, Delta/KLM didn’t have flights to the other destinations after France, or at least on the dates/times we were traveling.
Wizz is the airline we flew from Italy to Spain.
EasyJet is the airline from France to Germany, and Germany to Italy.
Aegan was used for Spain to Greece.Pricing is weird in Europe. They all had flexible seat choices (for a fee) so I could fit me and my family together, but there was like 5 different rates, some included luggage, some didn’t. And some included one carry on, some included two. Some included a checkin, and some checkins had varying size and weight prices. And no matter what you selected for luggage they’d still upsell you if you needed more luggage.
Tourism
GetYourGuide is what we used to book tickets to the top of the Eiffel Tower.
We heard to book early, but didn’t hear that until we were already approaching 30-40 days before the trip. And by then, all the direct/official tickets were already sold out. So we had to go through a tour vendor.
The costs weren’t too much, but were definitely inflated.
BigBusTours is a double decker red bus that is in a ton of major tourism destinations. You can buy a 24 hour pass to hop on and off wherever you want for a day as it does laps over and over all day between the major stops.
Viator is what we used to do a 5 hour walking tour around France.
If you want to hope in and out of the cool places but not learn about them, use BigBusTours. it’s cheap and convenient.
But if you want to experience and learn about the places, use a tour guide.
TripAdvisor was used to book our 7 hour safari in Dubai, and our helicopter ride over Dubai city and their islands. Most of them will require you add a WhatsApp number for communication about the event, meeting location, time changes, etc. Heads up, everyone is a hustler and they will also message you after you buy offering that if you buy direct they’ll give you a better deal. I didn’t want to waste time haggling so I just declined. Luckily, one of the numbers I screenshotted and sent the vendor and asked if it was also them. I had two people messaging about the same event, which was normal (one was usually the coordinator and the other was the actual facilitator doing the tour/ride/flight), and wanted to make sure this other person wasn’t scamming me. They replied that it was a TripAdvisor number. Like they were seeing if I’d take the bait. I imagine it could have lost us our safari if I engaged.
The Dubai Mall app was used to find stores and navigate the MASSIVE Dubai Mall. If I remember correctly, it has thousands of stores over 12,000,000 square feet. It had a built in GPS, store selector, and it would tell you how to get from exactly where you were to which store you wanted.
Food
Though we ate out at a lot of local places, especially this amazing smoothie place in Greece, we also ordered in a lot for convenience after traveling and sightseeing all day.
Just Eat was used for food in Italy. They had a lot of diversity.
There wasn’t any built in or easy way to translate the menu so I had to take screenshots of the menu, add to Google Translate, read, go back and line up which item it was, etc. over and over for me, my wife, and each of our kids.
Don’t count on timeliness for food deliveries in Italy either.
We waited 45 minutes before it said the driver was arriving. My son and I walked outside and waited… for an hour before I called them to ask what was going on. The guy spoke English and asked “what address?” The app showed delivered and they guy hadn’t even left. Another hour later (2 hours and 45 minutes total) and we finally had our food… at 3 am. 😴
Wolt was the #1 app for food in Greece. And it never worked for me. I couldn’t get it to verify my cell or WhatsApp.
eFood was recommended next. Eventually got it verified, but had to do the same thing with food translations as in Italy.
Transportation
We rented a car in Germany, and were able to use Uber in France, Greece, Italy, and once in Spain.
Uber worked okay in Barcelona, Spain, but was trash in Valencia, Spain. It said it would work, but every time we tried to connect to a driver, even though it showed some nearby, it always failed finding a driver.
We had seen signs for the Freenow app, so I downloaded that. It showed way more drivers, and they were 1/3 the cost. But connecting was still hard. We did catch a ride or two, but for every successful ride there were five failures. Ended up being easier to just to stand in a taxi line.
Greece was funky, in that no matter the app I used there were ZERO options for anything more than 4 seats. Kind of a problem when there are five of you. Few times we had to take two taxis. Every once in a while we’d get lucky and get a taxi that had a funky fold down fifth seat in the back.
Uber was decent in most of Dubai. The second day it didn’t have good luck, so I asked the concierge at the hotel what app everyone else was using and it was the Careem one. Ran into similar issues as I did with Freenow. So, again, a time or two we just took two taxis. One guy just told us all to squeeze in one. But the hotel always had a taxi ready, though we’d have to wait to get one big enough some times. But also Uber kicked in and worked well the rest of the time.
