Travel Tools & Technology

The right tools and technology can transform your travel experience, making it smoother, more efficient, and enjoyable. From booking apps to travel gadgets, this category highlights innovative solutions designed to enhance every aspect of your journey. Explore below for tips and insights on the best travel tools and technology available today.

Call and Surf Overseas without Roaming Fees

Using your mobile phone overseas can be an expensive exercise. But it doesn’t have to be. Many telcos now offer special deals on global roaming. You can save even more money by purchasing a local SIM card at your destination. If you want to keep your Australian phone number when travelling overseas, you’ll need to … Continued

Qantas’ iPads Know All About You

Have you ever wondered how your Qantas flight attendant instantly knew your favourite drink, your preferred name, or perhaps where you worked? The answer is that Qantas knows more about you than you may think. The Customer Service Manager (CSM) on every Qantas flight has access to a whole range of information about their passengers … Continued

Effortlessly Manage Your Travel Plans

If you travel frequently, it can be difficult to keep track of all those flight bookings, hotel reservations and other travel plans. Spreadsheets are one possible method, but there’s a much simpler option. There are a number of Apps and websites that can be used to conveniently store all of your travel reservations in one … Continued

Free Wifi on Qantas Flights

Qantas will soon launch free in-flight wifi on domestic flights! The announcement that high-speed internet will soon be available on Qantas’ Boeing 737 and Airbus A330 aircraft has been welcomed by our members. Would be great to be able to watch Netflix on my flights on the Golden Triangle as I usually exhaust everything I’m interested … Continued

New App Simplifies Award Availability Searches

Redeeming your frequent flyer points for reward flights is arguably the most rewarding part of the points chase! But it can also be the most frustrating part. Searching for award flight availability can be a painstaking task as reward seats are limited. With demand for reward seats often far outweighing supply, finding an award on … Continued

Learning a Foreign Language while Travelling

The ability to speak a foreign language can come in very handy in many different contexts. The skill is especially valuable for regular international travellers. But frequent travelling can also make it difficult to find time to attend classes and practice regularly. Learning any foreign language requires commitment, regular practice and time… a luxury not … Continued

Top Travel Apps

This week our members discuss their favourite apps for overseas travel. And there are certainly a wide range of different apps used by our members, for a large variety of purposes. Most our members use apps covering many different functionalities, such as this respondent: Tripit for my itinerary, Citymaps2go for offline maps w/ GPS, MyFlights … Continued

TripAdvisor: valuable resource or waste of time?

If you travel regularly, the chances are that you’ve used TripAdvisor, one of the world’s largest travel websites. This week our members discuss how they use TripAdvisor, be it for researching hotels, restaurants or otherwise. Many people find the website a particularly valuable resource for finding or checking out hotels as the reviews are from … Continued

Making free calls overseas over WiFi

Using your mobile phone overseas can be an expensive exercise. Phone service providers often charge exorbitant rates. And although some now offer special global roaming packages, they are still generally poor value when you compare them to other options out there. One option to bring down the cost of overseas calls is to buy a … Continued

Finding cheap flights

From time to time, we get inquiries from members struggling to find a cheap flight using points or cash. While the normal online tools, such as Skyscanner etc often work, sometimes they just are not good enough. In this case, it was a flight to South America, which seemed to be coming up very expensive. … Continued

Goodbye to the Australia Network

For many years it has been a sight for sore eyes. Whether you travel for pleasure or for business, it’s always been a welcome addition to a hotel’s TV programming. We are talking about the Australia Network, a cable TV channel mainly offered in Asia that featured the best (and sometimes the worst) shows from … Continued