You’ve bought your plane ticket, booked your hotels, lined up tours, and you’ll be heading to a country in Latin America on vacation. Great! You’re not quite done yet though. Make sure you’re prepared for what can go wrong along the way by getting a few extra travel apps on your phone or laptop.
It’s easy to forget about what’s going to be different where you’re headed or what can go wrong that you didn’t anticipate. There can be security risks, communication issues, and medical problems that can crop up, for starters. Having everything you need at your fingertips is going to make your trip a whole lot stressful if any issues do arise.
Here are a few software items and travel apps you want to have at the ready as you travel to Mexico, Central America, or South America.
Cloud Backups and a Password Manager
If your passport gets stolen, do you have a copy of it on your phone? What if your phone gets stolen too? Can you still get to your passport, your boarding passes, and your credit card dashboards?
With the right tools in place, this will be a pain but not nearly as big of a pain as it would be if you didn’t have backups. Upload all trips docs, including your passport and driver’s license, to a cloud service like Dropbox, Google Drive, or Apple’s system. Then if anything happens, you can get them from a public computer or your companion’s device just by logging in.
The second part of this is having a password manager that’s independent of your device—one that can also work on any computer or phone by logging in. I use LastPass, but there are others such as OnePassword or Bitwarden that will put all your log-ins behind one secure master password.
Also, I rely on the TripIt app to keep track of all my flights, ground transportation, hotels, and tours. Most of the time the process is automatic: it pulls the confirmation from my personal Yahoo e-mail where I receive everything travel-related and puts it in the app automatically.
Use a VPN for Public Wi-Fi
Most travelers log into public Wi-Fi in airports, hotels, or coffee shops without worrying about how secure the network is. This makes hackers very happy if it’s a spoofing network or one with low security. People with bad intentions can plant a virus or get to your private information that’s stored on that device.
Google and Facebook also love it when they can track you freely, including your specific location. Streaming services love it when they can deny you service that you’re paying for because you’re not in your home country.
If you want to stay secure and keep a shred of privacy, use a VPN (virtual private network) to anonymize your location, log into a server in your home country, and keep your connection secure. See this article on understanding VPNs to learn more.
Travel Insurance Plus a Medical App
What happens if your flight gets delayed for 12 hours or the airline loses your luggage? What will you do if you need medical attention in Mexico City or in the Amazon jungle? A good travel insurance policy can help you out in all these situations by covering your medical needs and reimbursing you for delays or baggage problems. You can also buy membership in a program that provides medical transport by air if you need to fly back home for treatment.
The better companies will also guide you to local English-speaking doctors and help you figure out the names of your meds in a local pharmacy. I’ve written before about medical mobile apps and the one I have on my phone as part of my policy with Allianz. I haven’t had to use it, thankfully, but it gives me peace of mind knowing it is there at the ready when the time comes.
Data Wherever There’s a Signal
If there’s some kind of emergency and you need a signal to get to your documents in the cloud, or you need to make an international call over Wi-Fi, do you have plenty of data at the ready where you’ll be landing? Are you sure?
If your phone carrier is any company besides T-Mobile, you probably have to pay a hefty extra fee to use your phone normally in another country. And even if you do have that service’s free roaming, their partner carrier speeds can be painfully slow in a country like Argentina, where I had trouble using Google Maps to walk around because of the lag.
If you download an eSIM app though and sign up for their plan, you can surf the web and communicate easily no matter where you are in the country—as long as there’s a cell signal. I’ve used Holafly and Gigsky myself, but there are plenty of others you can compare such as Saily, Airalo, and Pangia Pass.
A Translation App for Spanish or Portuguese
If you’re headed to Belize, you won’t need to worry about communication and you’ll find a high level of English proficiency in tourist hotspots like Cancun, Los Cabos, Panama City, and parts of Costa Rica. In a whole lot of other places in Latin America, however, the locals are only going to speak Spanish (most of the region) or Portuguese (Brazil). In parts of the Andes Mountains, Spanish is their second language already, after an indigenous one, so they’re not about to learn a third one.
Fortunately, communication is getting easier every year with apps like Google Translate and Deepl. We’re almost in the Star Trek future where you can speak into your phone in one language and it comes out in another for the person you’re trying to talk to. There’s a lag of a few seconds now and occasional AI hallucinations, but the process will keep getting faster and better.
You can also use this app to translate menus, street signs, and posted notifications, which can be very handy if you’re stumped.
Apps for Airlines, Hotel Chains, and Credit Cards
While I mentioned earlier that TripIt helps me stay organized with all my travel bookings, I also usually have a back-up in two other places: my e-mail and the company’s app. The airline apps ensure that I have a boarding pass handy no matter what and that I’ll get an alert if there’s a gate change or delay.
There are more regional hotel chains in Latin America than international ones and far more independent hotels than in the USA or Canada. If you have status with Hilton, Marriott, IHG, or Hyatt, however, they all have enough luxury properties in the region that you can probably book one in the country you’re going to. Install their app so you have another reservation back-up and a customer service contact at the ready.
Last, you want to have the apps for any credit cards you are carrying on your phone, in addition to having at least one on your phone to use with Apple Pay or Google Pay. If your card gets lost, stolen, or eaten by an ATM, then you want to be able to quickly cancel it. If your card gets denied, you want to be able to quickly resolve the problem and unblock it.
You always want to have more than one credit card and more than one debit card too, just in case, but we’ll save that subject for another article. For now, use this checklist for travel apps to get before you take off.
