App in the Air: Flight & Hotel

App in The Air is my second favorite travel app ever (the first, and in my opinion the best is Flighty). While most of the REALLY good travel apps have “upped their game”, App in The Air and Flighty have gone above and beyond to stand out and supply you information that is not only useful, but also necessary, accurate and nicely displayed. I’m a premium subscriber to both apps and I believe that paying for the premium subscriptions is well worth it, if you fly more than a couple of times a year. It’s also worth noting that the “really good” travel apps (such as these) spend a lot of money to provide their apps with the timely and accurate data feeds that provide the end user (that’s me and you) with all of this detailed travel information that we’re seeing.

Automatic checkin was really handy on my first check in, but on my second it changed my pre-selected “main cabin extra” seat 8A to 25C (which shouldn’t even have been possible if I *didnt* have a pre-assigned seat given my auto checkin preferences). That makes auto check-in useless (I had to go into the American app and reselect my seat, which was fortunately still available). For flight info and updates it’s handy: automatically detected my reservations from my email so there was no data entry. It didn’t pick up the correct seat assignment from my American Airlines reservations (e.g. 12F instead of 12B somehow on one flight), but it was easy enough to edit that, and I’d use my boarding pass on the plane anyway. It also let me know about a lounge at STL I didn’t know about before, although it wasn’t in the terminal I was going to. It’s managed to replace Kayak as my source of flight info, although Kayak is free. I hope auto checkin gets more reliable, because it would be handy if I could trust it to not thoroughly screw up my prepaid seat assignment.

I fly >100k miles a year with a mix of international and domestic destinations. This app is great to predict potential delays and also track my overall progress and other stats (types of planes, milestones, etc). The only negative is how it displays the current flight status as tiles where I have to swipe to see the anticipated arrival gate, etc and the location of the plane midnight doesn’t provide a map since I’m not hooked up to the internet. This is where Tripit and FlightRadar24 best this app out respectively. Tripit provides a really quick snapshot of what I have to do and where I need to go. While FlightRadar pretty much provides near real time data on the plane among other things. True, flightradar also needs WiFi, but it provides far more useful information when connected such as weather along the flight path, where other flights are coming from, etc. I typically use this app, flightradar, and Tripit to predict delays. I wish there was one app.

Very handy. However, I have the impression that to fully utilize the functionality it needs a _lot_ of sensitive access - for example, I found its import from Tripit wasn’t complete when I added plans to Tripit after my initial connection to the service. That is all I’m willing to give it now. Also, it’s kind of a hacker’s playground. I see the features, but I’m too technical to want to find out what doesn’t work without knowing how things are implemented before I spend time (and get “locked in” to) a new thing. I wish the documentation was better, but I realize that most people will just be sold on it and give it a try without my level of expectations and privacy concerns. To wit: I’m wary about letting any app simply try to parse through my email continually looking for travel receipts. If it is possible (and it may be, but wasn’t obvious) to set up an address just from which plans could be email-forwarded (as with Tripit) it would be a fine alternative. If I were paying for Tripit’s subscription features, and it was clear I could set up an address as mentioned above (accept and process forwarded mail, but you aren’t getting credentials to pull from that account), I’d be very inclined to drop Tripit for App In The Air, but my needs at this point don’t justify it. I like the app, wish you luck, and will look forward to seeing it get better.

I was researching what apps to use for my upcoming trip to Florida and I had a layover so I figured it was best to be prepared Incase any gate changes happens. This app was the best thing I’ve ever downloaded because the day before I was flying out, it already had what gate my flight was departing from. The best thing was that the night before the flight it told me what gate and number my flight was departing from, what gate my flight was landing at, and what gate + number my other flight was departing from. Not even the own airline had all of that information!! The airline just told me the basics like what gate Im supposed to be at, not the number. Will definitely remember this app whenever I’m flying. Thank you so much, don’t know how you guys get that information but it’s very useful!!