Top 10 travel apps for your smartphone that make travelling easier

As if that wasn't quite enough, you can also share trip details with friends, so they know your progress and location, while an annual counter tells you how many kilometres you've spent in the air, flying away from home.

2 PACKING PRO

The kitsch suitcase icon for Packing Pro disguises some serious firepower in this essential and well-designed app. Challenging the universally accepted truth that packing is an awful experience, it aims to take the stress out of pre-departure through intuitive lists of everything from clothing to gadgets.

Simply add what you need from the master catalog – scuba gloves, sterile dressings, a baby leash – and then tick down the contents. Packing Pro lets you assign items to specific bags so you can keep track of everything, and even tally weight so you don't go over the airline's limit. And, as an added benefit, because everything can be labelled and photographed, reporting the contents of lost luggage to an insurance company just got a whole lot easier.

3 ENTRAIN

Without question, jet lag is one of the worst side-effects of travel, and people have made money for decades off snake-oil cures that claim to prevent it. Entrain, developed by scientists at the University of Michigan, does something new: it prepares a traveller for new timezones by monitoring their circadian rhythms, which are kept in-sync by light. The app records your "lighting history" – how much exposure to sunlight you get in your everyday life – and then models from this "your body's internal time".

After inputting a destination time zone, Entrain then produces a schedule of lightning instructions to help you gently shift this internal time. In other words, it helps you reach the new time zone before you even get on the plane, preventing the awful fatigue that often stretches over several days. This is technology at its masterful best.

4 SLEEPSOUNDS HQ

Sometimes even the best hotels turn out to be impossible when it comes to sleep: the highway outside is an endless honk of gridlock; the cleaner insists on banging an ice machine every time she passes. SleepSounds HQ offers a simple but brilliant solution: it lets you mask all distractions with more than 600 tracks, which can be combined into a staggering 35 trillion different soundscapes. Recorded on location around the world, these tracks mean a noisy economy cabin can now fill with soothing cicadas from the Australian outback, or pulsing Cairo can calm with the noises of a working flour mill. It means that it's possible to escape at any moment, which is no small thing to anybody who's ever found themselves stuck in a sonic nightmare.

5 WI-FI FINDER

An increasing reliance on technology has another downside: an increasing reliance on mobile data. Many people will have turned on global roaming to check their emails and returned home to an exorbitant monthly bill, often ranging into the thousands of dollars. Phone companies are slowly catching up by offering package deals for reasonable fees, but in the meantime Wi-Fi Finder promises to rescue your bank account.

Simply download the offline database, then navigate the map to your current location, whether London, Capetown, or Istanbul. Wi-Fi Finder claims to track more than 650,000 locations in 144 countries, and no connection is needed to find what you need. Paid Wi-Fi spots are highlighted in blue, free spots are noted in green, and the app includes hotels, cafes, fast food outlets, and even museums, giving multiple options for any time of day. All of which means never being stuck without email again – for better or worse.

6 GOOGLE TRANSLATE

In A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, characters stick a "small, yellow, leech-like" animal into their ear which feeds off brain waves and produces instant translations from any language. We may be a few generations off a genuine Babel Fish (thankfully), but Google Translate comes pretty close.

Like all digital translators, it lets you type in words to sort through a dictionary. It also lets you talk into the device, offering verbal translations in return; you can even place it on a table and carry out a basic conversation with somebody speaking French or Turkish. The real marvel, though, is the visual translator: hold up the phone to signs or menus and Google will literally superimpose a translation over the image in real time. "Arc de Triomphe" becomes the "Triumphal Arch," bringing humanity ever closer to a single transnational culture.

7 GOOGLE MAPS

At the risk of handing out too many kudos to a giant and vaguely unsettling technology corporation, the handheld Google Maps is just as valuable as Translate. A clean, easily navigable interface is just the beginning: this app can show you traffic congestion, public transit options, biking paths, and a brilliant "explore nearby" feature that modulates its output depending on the time of day (coffee shops in the morning, bars late at night).

But perhaps what sets this app apart is its combination of these base elements with social media and customisation. User reviews are terrific and readily available, along with crowd-sourced photos and menus. If you take advantage of the "save" feature, starring the map with places you like or want to visit, Google Maps will also make recommendations. All of which adds up to never being lost, unless you want to be.

8 TRAVELSAFE PRO

In the unlikely event of an emergency, it's a good idea to know who to call. TravelSafe Pro, and other apps like it, dispense with the stress by providing what is essentially a targeted database of police and ambulance contacts across the world. Need a fire department in Italy? An embassy in Detroit? Mountain rescue in the Alps? A touch of a button pulls up easy-to-navigate lists so you don't need to waste time fumbling through the search engine.

Like travel insurance, this is a "what if" precautionary measure; but it might be a lifesaver in certain circumstances, offering peace of mind when you need it most.

9 TIPULATOR

One of the earliest apps to launch in Apple's App Store, way back in 2007, Tipulator has remained a crowd favourite ever since for addressing a perennial problem: how much to tip in restaurants. In countries like America, there are few social customs more alarming to foreign visitors, and few that people get so consistently wrong.

Simply plug in the bill total and tax, then specific the tip percentage (in America, 20 per cent is standard). Tipulator will then offer a grand total, which you can choose to round up or down, or even divide between multiple people if you happen to be splitting the cheque. Then just leave the amount displayed. This way you avoid those awkward moments where you accidentally offend the wait staff and they chase you down the street.

10 WIKITUDE

Definitely the most space-age app on the list, and one that's only just began to reach its full potential, Wikitude hints at the future of "augmented reality".Your phone slips into traditional camera mode, but with a twist: categories like "restaurants", "Trip Advisor" and "Wikipedia", turn the world around you into an interactive map. Hold the phone up to a museum, and a display box will appear on-screen displaying information about it; eateries now come with reviews accessible simply through locational data, hovering over the image. Wikitude ever comes with a currency convertor which scans bills and offers an immediate exchange rate. In effect, the internet fuses with the three-dimensional environment, hinting at a whole new era for the traveller's guidebook.