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How to Plan a European Road Trip: Apps You Need [2024]
It can be hard work planning a European road trip. Choosing the ideal country, identifying must-see locations, finding places to stay the night, and planning your route all require consideration. Thankfully, we’re going to share with you several apps that can give useful information to plan your trip.
Some of these apps are also practical tools that you can use while you’re travelling to make the experience more seamless.
Table of Contents
- Must-have apps for your European road trip
- Apps for road trips
Must-have apps for your European road trip
Park4night
Ask anyone who has been on a road trip in a camper van for any length of time and park4night is going to be one of their most used apps.
It has everything on there including car parks, overnight spots, places to find water, to empty toilets, to find gas, which is great when you’re planning your road trip as you can find locations on your route.
The really helpful part is that other users leave reviews for places so you know what to expect and whether ti’s okay to stay there. You can create your own folder so that you can keep together all of your favourites for a trip. It’s a game changer. You only have to pay £7.99 for pro access and this means that you have access to all the locations on there.
We find park4night the most useful app but you you can find other apps to find places to stay the night
Other apps for camp spots
- Camper contact for motorhome sites
- iOverlander for camp spots especially if you're in a 4x4
- Stay free for free overnight spots
- Hip Camp to find campsites
Google Maps
Finding things to do
I’m sure most people use Google maps frequently for navigation but it’s also great for finding activities. A great way to use it to help plan your road trip is to search ‘things to do’ in the location you are going to, or if you know you want to find some things like waterfalls, you can also search this in an area on the map and find places there.
Creating your own map
Did you know that you can pin places onto your own maps using Google My Maps so you can save locations you want to visit.
Check out our blog on how to plan a European road trip for tips on how to use Google maps to keep all of your bucket list locations in one place. You can even add your driving route there so that you can pin places along your route.
For inspiration you can also view other people’s maps if they share the link with you. If you need some travel inspiration, make sure to have a look at our European travel guides, each guide includes a road trip route and accompanying Google maps of locations.
Waze
Waze is a brilliant navigation app due to its real-time data and user input, which means you can have live information about traffic, road works, hazards, police and the fastest routes to take.
Helpfully for planning a road trip, Waze can also tell you how much you will spend on tolls along your route, ideal if you’re trying to take the cheapest route.
AllTrails
For any lover of the outdoors, the AllTrails app is a must. With an extensive map of hiking trails, GPS tracking and the ability to download hikes, you never need to worry about having a paper map to navigate or losing signal and getting lost.
You can find hiking trails as well as bike and trail-running routes and there are hikes from an hour long to multi-day hikes.
It’s a community-driven app where people are able to leave reviews on a hike so you can see what the trail was like recently, whether it’s suitable for dogs, how difficult it is, which is great when deciding if a hike is suitable for you.
Maps.me
Another app we love for hiking is maps.me. Some countries don’t have the best documented hiking trails and for this maps.me is great, you can see all the footpaths and are able to plan your own route.
With this app you can drop pins on the map and it will calculate an estimated distance for the route you want to do so it’s useful if there is no trail on other resources.
You can also download the map for a particular region which means that you will have access to it even if you don’t have signal.
iTranslate Converse
Travel outside main tourist areas and you’re likely to meet people you don’t share a common language with. During these times, while gestures can get you so far, sometimes you need more.
With iTranslate converse, you simply speak into the app and it translates and speaks your message. The best part is you don’t need to keep switching the language when someone replies.
We used this on so many occasions during our travels, basic conversations with people to getting by at the mechanic in Türkiye. Even if you want to try to avoid using a translator, it’s great to have as a backup in situations when you’re really struggling to communicate.
Currency Converter Plus
One app that is always very helpful to have when travelling is a currency converter app and we sue Currency Converter Plus. Sometimes it’s really hard to remember the conversion, it’s very rarely something simple like £1 = €1, so it can be hard to do the mental math. This app is great because it’s really simple to change the currency depending on the country you’re in.
Yr.no
Yr.no is one of the best weather apps we found. It’s really reliable and you can see an hourly forecast which is ideal when you’re trying to plan your day.
It’s especially good if you’re visiting Scandinavia as it has some indicators that are useful when trying to see if the Northern Lights will be visible!
Apps for road trips
There you have it, those are our must-have apps for planning a European road trip and to use while you’re travelling. If we had to only have one of these, it would 100% be park4night because you can find so much information on there, it’s a perfect app to help plan your road trip because you can find camp spots near activities.
