How I Planned my NYC Trip From my Smartphone

Believe it or not, my trip to New York was the first trip I’ve ever planned on my own. Most of the other trips I’ve taken in the past have all been planned through my church, since most of them have been domestic or international mission trips.

So this trip was the first one where I felt like everything was really up to me and my friend. That meant we had to come up with your own plans of what we wanted to see, and figure everything out for ourselves. It was an awesome opportunity - but also a bit of an overwhelming one. Fortunately, I found that we could do most of our planning right from my smartphone.

Here are some of the ways you can use technology to your advantage when planning a trip to another city.

Use Your Maps App

My most used app before and during this trip was the Maps app on my phone - and not just because I didn’t want to get lost. When we were still planning the places we wanted to visit in Manhattan, I always made sure to find their exact locations through this app. This helped us plan our days out accordingly, so that we could visit all the places we wanted to in each area in one go, rather than having to come back. Another neat thing about the Maps app is that you can view Yelp ratings for most places right then and there, which is super helpful. Oh, and finally, you can also see subway stations on the app, which helped us a ton!

Use Pinterest as a Resource

Only one of the many things I love about Pinterest - it’s great for helping plan trips! If you’re visiting a major city in the U.S. (or really, anywhere in the world), you’re pretty much guaranteed to find travel guides for it on the site. After just a little bit of searching here I had so many ideas for places we could visit or restaurants we could eat from. My advice would be to make a list of all the ones that sound interesting from people’s guides and blog posts, and then look them up on your own to decide whether to include them in your own itinerary.

Follow Local Instagram Accounts

Aside from Pinterest, another great resource I found to locate things I wanted to see/eat was believe it or not, Instagram. I already followed a few people who live in NYC, so I made sure to pay extra close attention to their posts before my trip, in case anything stood out that I wanted to try. I recommend searching for a list of the best Instagrammers in the city you're visiting and then looking through their feeds to find interesting meals or hangouts that you may be interested in. It will save you a lot of time, and you might even get some photo inspiration out of it!

Plan Your Meals Ahead of Time

If you're going to a place with a food scene as diverse as New York City's, you'll definitely benefit from planning you want to eat ahead of time. Before our trip, my friend and I researched restaurants we wanted to check out in the city and located them through our Maps apps to figure out where to eat each day. Of course, things don't always go perfectly. Sometimes you'll spend too much time in one place and not have time for a full meal, or you'll change your mind last minute on what you want to eat. That's part of the adventure of traveling, so don't stress about it. But it definitely helps to have a plan to fall back on rather than spending a good half an hour searching on Yelp last minute.

Ask Google for Transportation Help

This was more helpful during the trip, but you can certainly figure out your transportation fully before you arrive to your intended destination. We don't have a subway system in Houston (but plenty of traffic to make up for it), so it took us awhile to figure out how New York's underground transportation worked. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that if you type your current and intended destination right into the Google search bar, it will tell you exactly which subway train(s) you can take to get where you're going. It also tells you when the next train is departing, though we found that to be a little off sometimes.

Don't you just love how helpful the internet and smartphones can be sometimes? What are some of your best travel tips?

#travel #2016