WorldMate | Life of Android

The Story

For travelling business types, keeping tabs on where they’re supposed to be and when is tricky. Now you can can either fork out for a PA to look after your travel schedule, be on-call 24/7 and nag at you for not collecting enough receipts. Or you can download Worldmate and let your Android phone take the strain for a fraction of the cost. PAs beware, Worldmate is coming for your jobs…

The Experience

WorldMate looks the part. It’s thoughtfully designed with an icon-driven homescreen that gives you access to hotel bookings, flight searches, weather reports, a currency converter, ‘My Trips’ – your itinerary log, and finally the travel notification screen that allows you to customise how and when Worldmate harasses you with alarms.

Weather and Currency are simple enough. The currency converter automatically converts Sterling into Dollars and Euros and the refresh button in the top right means you’ve always got the latest monetary info to hand before you make the conversion. Weather gives you a five-day forecast for your current location, or any of the cities on your route. You can also search for a weather report should you need to. Both fairly simple menu tabs, both work just fine.

Flight Search is simply a case of entering your departure location, where you wish to travel to, and when. You can specify non-stop flights and then sort the list by departure time. Once you’ve found your flight, you’ll need to move outside of Worldmate to make your booking as there’s no travel affiliate that allows the app to book directly.

The hotel finder, on the other hand, does let you book directly via hotels.com. Once you’ve selected your destination city, you’re presented with a list, sortable by hotels.com’s recommendations, by price, star rating, or distance. Should you wish to book, you’re taken to a fairly standard information form that requires you to enter your personal and credit card details, but there’s no option to login to an existing account, so you’ll have to do this manually.

My Trips is where things get really clever. After your flights, hotels and other booking arrangements have been made, you simply forward your email confirmations to Worldmate and they will take care of itinerary building for you, and you can access your itineraries via the app or at WorldMate.com

While WorldMate isn’t quite the one-stop shop it could be – a flight-purchasing affiliate should be top of the list of to-dos – it’s a comprehensive travel app in more or less every other way. If you travel a lot, keeping tabs on email confirmations is a time-consuming job that you’d normally have to hire a PA to assist with.