Best Free Travel Apps of 2015

Travel search website for finding the best deals on flights: what time to leave, number of layovers, and which airlines you can use. In its early days, Kayak only handled search (although it was one of the best at that end of the game), but now you can prepay for flights, hotel reservations, and even car rentals. Additionally, Kayak includes in its searches other aggregation services, like Orbitz and Priceline, to truly make sure you find the best deal.

Maps.Me
Free
The Maps.Me mobile app lets you browse around the globe, zoom in on any region or city, and download a detailed map of that area to use offline. You'll see an option to download just the map or the map with directions enabled to get you from point A to B without an Internet connection. What is good about Maps.Me is the great level of detail on maps for lesser traveled places, such as Freetown, Sierra Leone (shown), which isn't well mapped by Google Maps. It's a must-have travel app for those who wander off the beaten path.

Free
Snag a dinner reservation in less than a minute with the OpenTable app. OpenTable is pretty widely used in major cities in the U.S. and Canada, as well as in London. It lets you find restaurants that meet your criteria, see opening times, read reviews, and make reservations online at no charge. It's a great restaurant resource when you're in any city, but especially while traveling.

Free
Orbitz Flights, Hotels, Cars searches for the best travel deals, lets you book them, and offers a price guarantee if another user books the same travel as you for less. Orbitz's app is the kind that anyone would want for planning a trip ahead of time to find low prices, as well as last-minute bookings from the road.

Roadtrippers
Free
Tell Roadtrippers your starting location and destination, dates of travel, and what kinds of things you're interested in finding along the way, and this app will plot your journey for you. Roadtrippers can find offbeat attractions, restaurants, museums, amusement parks, camp sites, and more. When you find a site you like, just add it to your trip, and Roadtrippers will redraw your travel map accordingly.

Free
This app and website (roomertravel.com) helps travelers sell their prepaid reservations to people who can use them to recoup some of that otherwise lost cost. If you need a hotel in a pinch, you can also see if anyone on Roomer is trying to offload a hotel room in your desired location. Everyone wins.

SkyScanner
SkyScanner's mobile app has such a Free wonderful search interface for finding cheap flights. You can look for a flight on certain dates from your home airport to anywhere in the world based on where it might be inexpensive to fly during that time. You can then adjust your search using a wonderfully intuitive and interactive graph to find the cheapest surrounding dates to travel. SkyScanner partners with a site called ebookers.com for the actual sale, and note that SkyScanner's prices appeared for me in U.S. dollars while ebookers' showed up in GBP. The company makes separate apps for hotel and car rentals.

Triposo
Free
Driving through the desert or deep into mountains, you can't be sure you'll have Internet access. Triposo puts offline maps and travel guides onto your phone so you can use them even in dead zones. Before you download maps and guides for any destination, Triposo tells you how much space they will take up on your phone, too. When you pull up a destination on Triposo, it offers top sightseeing suggestions, a weather forecast, and more ways to explore the destination.

Yelp
Free
The beauty of Yelp, an app that offers user-generated recommendations for businesses, is that it's used widely by a lot of people. If you show up at a destination and want to find a decent cup of coffee within walking distance, Yelp will probably do the best job. While some other travel apps have plenty of recommendations from other travelers, Yelp is more likely to be used by locals. It's especially good with restaurants, but Yelp can also help you find auto repair shops, health clinics, and other places you might need to visit unexpectedly while on a trip.

GasBuddy
Free
This app and website helps you find gas by location and price. If you can save a couple of bucks by cruising a little farther down the road, GasBuddy will let you know. 

Gogobot
Free
Gogobot is a social travel app that helps you find places to stay, eat, and play. Gogobot's globetrotting community of users upload photos, information, and ratings for the sites, while also tagging them based on different interests, such as family, foodie, local, outdoor, budget, and adventure. You can explore an area ahead of time and save points of interest to a list in the app. Photos taken by other users help you get a better sense of what you might find at different places of interest.