8 Must-Know Travel Websites for Every Wanderlust Explorer

Let’s get real – travel is expensive, stressful, and occasionally a logistical nightmare. You’ve got flights to book, bags to pack, and at least one friend who wants to create a 17-tab spreadsheet just to plan a weekend getaway. (Okay, okay, I’m that friend.)

The good news, however, is this: the internet is full of free, life-saving websites that can turn you into a travel genius – without expensive apps or unnecessary stress.

Whether you are tracking for leisure, reading signs in foreign lands, or just curious to know where the airplane passing above is going, this list has you covered. In this post, I’ll be sharing the coolest travel websites nobody knows about, which is a real shame because they are literally so awesome.

Hope you find them useful!

I’m going to start with some of the funky ones that I love, but perhaps not so practical in everyday use as some of the rest on the list, beginning with…

FlightRadar
For restless travel wanderlusters like us, FlightRadar is a totally awesome site where you can track planes in the sky… all around the world! With a single click, you can view where the plane departed from, where it’s headed, and tons of other information about the plane as well.

And yes, this thing is actually eye-opening. In fact, get on the website today and I am pretty sure you will be surprised at how many planes are flying in the air at one time. Not only can you see what planes are flying where around the world (which is awesome if you’d like to track someone’s flight to make sure they get where they need to go safely), they even have an app, so if you’re out getting errands and you glance up in the air wondering where exactly a specific plane is headed, you can figure that out too.

There is another website similar to this called MarineTraffic, if you would like to track boats out at sea!

Radio Garden
Another totally awesome website is Radio Garden, where you can tune in to a live broadcast from thousands of stations around the world.

Visit this website and you can observe what’s on anywhere in the world. It’s maybe not so much the most convenient website around, but it’s definitely really interesting and fun if you’re trying to learn a new language or if you just want to tap into what everyone else is hearing elsewhere in the globe.

And if you ever feel homesick overseas, you could always use it to tune into your hometown radio station at home for a little comfort!

Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is a great site, and it’s great if you’re in need of some reading material to practice another language maybe, or if you just need some reading material for long flights.

This website utilizes the Project Gutenberg website and is actually the world’s largest digital library with over 70,000 free ebooks to download. That’s a lot of books to pack up for reading during travel time!

If you like audiobooks there’s LibriVox for that too.

And just a plug quick, if you don’t already have a library card from your public library, do yourself a favour and get one. Libraries have sooo many wonderful free things, including digital ones such as free magazines, free guidebooks, and lots more.

I am truly the biggest library nerd – if you think that it’s an underutilized resource, post a comment on this post and tell me what yours has because I just love to hear it. Ours has free hiking backpacks and poles you can check out and a free seed library!

Temp-Mail
Now for the next. Let’s say you are overseas and you have to enter your email for some reason, like to be able to get onto some free WiFi or whatever, but you don’t desire to get emails from them for the remainder of your life.

Temp-Mail is a site that will give you a temporary free email box to use so you can join, get what you need, then exit.

Nothing is more frustrating than getting hundreds of emails from services you were sort of pressured into joining, but you have no use or need to ever hear from or use again. Sure, you can always unsubscribe later, but when you are traveling, time is money! With Temp-Mail, you won’t have to spend any time at all on unsubscribing, which translates to more time to sightsee and take pictures.

Cruise Mapper
If you’re taking a holiday somewhere that is a huge cruise destination but you’re not traveling on a cruise yourself, then CruiseMapper website is SO handy.

As we know, areas can get very crowded and crazy during times when cruise ships are in port, just because thousands of more people pour into the city at once. So if you don’t want to deal with the worst of the crowds but don’t feel like taking a guess, then this site is perfect.

In effect, what it allows you to do is see the schedule for a number of different cruise ports so that you can organize your own trip in advance. If you’re traveling somewhere during peak cruise season (such as Dubrovnik in summer) CruiseMapper is essential!

Photographer’s Ephemeris
The Photographer’s Ephemeris web site is great for your photography friends like yourselves who want to take fine shots on a trip, and who I hope, is every person!

We’ve all been on holiday when we’ve arrived at a bucket list landmark or feature and the light is not playing ball. Photographer’s Ephemeris allows you to view the direction of the sun and how it will hit the land at any time, anywhere, so that you can better visualize the lighting situation of your photo or video production.

And obviously, there is so much more to traveling than getting your picture taken, and the Roman Colosseum is stunning when it’s drizzly or being backlit, but if you do have that one special photograph in mind (maybe for something special – e.g., for a proposal!) then this place will help ensure that everything will be perfect, right down to the light.

AirHelp
AirHelp is a very helpful site if your flight is delayed but you have no idea how to claim compensation or even how much you can claim.

They basically do all the work for you, so you can still have your holidays even if there is a delay. It’s as simple as just scanning your boarding pass and it’ll tell you whether you’re entitled to compensation or not. They’ll also process the claim for compensation on your behalf and won’t charge you anything unless they win.

And even though they might succeed in winning you some money, their own fee is then subtracted from the claim, so if you simply don’t feel like doing it all yourself or don’t understand how to do it, then it’s no-lose for you.

Forvo
If you’re going to some place where you don’t speak the language and you’d like to know some basics in advance, then at one time or another you will maybe need help on pronouncing things. I prefer to know how the locals pronounce the names of where I’m going, for instance, because in most instances it might be different than we learn to know it by in English.

Well, if that’s the case for you, then the website Forvo is a “pronunciation dictionary” where people from all over the world record themselves pronouncing different words.

There are sadly some robotic AI posts but you can easily filter those ones out.

As an emergency, occasionally I also just jump on Google Translate too and enter words in then hit the speaker button and listen to how it’s pronounced. It’s not fool proof but usually fairly good.

Incidentally, if you’re having trouble pronouncing something that’s not on Forvo and the best you can do is look up things in the International Phonetic Alphabet (let’s be real, who even knows how to pronounce those symbols?), there is actually a great website called IPA Reader where you can paste in the IPA bit and it will read it out for you.