Holiday Planning: There’s an App For That!

Want a better way to track your trick-or-treaters? Can’t decide what to cook this Thanksgiving? Stressed about making holiday travel plans? Help for these problems and more is as close as your Smartphone. Yes, you guessed it – there’s an app for holiday planning. Several apps, to be exact. Here are a few of the most potentially helpful apps for you to use over the upcoming holiday season.

• Trick or Tracker. For $4.99, this Android app lets you sync your phone with your kid’s phone. You can receive text updates on their locations, and if they need to find you, they can track you as well. Trick or Tracker also allows you to program a specific boundary, and notifies you if your child goes outside of it. For a similar iPhone app, try Footprints. This one is free, and it allows you to track not only where your kids are now, but also lets you see the path they took to get there. Another strong feature of this app is the parental settings that prohibit kids from blocking it or removing it from their phones.

• DarkHaunts. Looking for an unusual and spooky Halloween destination? For $.99, this Android app can probably find one for you. It has a database of over 3200 sites that purport to be haunted, and it can tell you which ones are closest to you, as well as providing you with the back story of how the place  came to be known as haunted.

• Pair it – food and wine guide. Are you hosting Thanksgiving this year? Worried about what wine goes with what dish? This app can help. Available on both the iPhone and Android, Pair It has a database of over 200 wines… just enter in your dish or entrée and it will find a wine to match.

• Grocery iQ. This app can help you save some money on your Thanksgiving dinner shopping. Apart from the ability to scan bar codes in stores and help organize your shopping list, this app helpfully provides you with coupons for the items that you just have to have. This app is available on both iPhone and Android.

• Kayak. This app, which can be found for iPhone, Android, or Blackberry, is perfect if you’re going to be traveling this holiday season, or if you’re going to be the one picking up out-of-town relatives from the airport. This free app can compare rates and availability of hotels and airline flights, and it can also track the status of incoming flights. Whether you’re the traveler or the host this holiday season, this app can help you out.

There really does seem to be an app for nearly everything. Take advantage of some of these cheap or free apps to help make your holidays run a little more smoothly.