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Monday, March 7, 2016

Now You Can Renew Your Passport With An App

The demand for passport renewals has spiked because the State Department has stopped adding visa pages to U.S. passports. (iStock)

Forget schlepping to the post office or the DMV. If you have a smartphone, an envelope and a credit card, you can now renew your passport at home.

Ten years after the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI) required Americans traveling to Mexico, Canada, the Caribbean and Bermuda to carry U.S. passports, the ItsEasy Passport Renewal & Photo app has arrived just in time for tens of millions of Americans whose passports will soon expire. The app, a free download, was released this month for iPhones and will soon be available for Android phones.

“Nearly 10 years after implementation of the WHTI and the associated surge of passport applications, the Bureau of Consular Affairs is preparing for an anticipated surge as those applicants renew their passports,” said William Cocks, a spokesman for the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs. “We expect increased passport applications to continue through 2018.”

Frequent flyers may need passport renewals, too, because the State Department has stopped adding visa pages to U.S. passports. Until this year, passport holders could pay to have 24-page visa inserts added when their passports were full.

The ItsEasy app guides customers through the passport renewal process, starting with determining whether the expired passport is actually renewable.

There are numerous reasons why a passport may not be renewable, said David Alwadish, CEO and president of the app’s developer, ItsEasy.com. “For example, the traveler may not have the most recent passport in his or her possession, or it may be damaged beyond what is acceptable to the Department of State. Or the most recent passport may have expired more than five years ago.

“In each of these cases, the customer would need to apply for a new passport rather than a renewal.”

The ItsEasy app provides guidelines for taking a passport photo with your smartphone, and a gauge to help ensure that faces are sized to the proper dimensions.

The app sends an email with a printable passport renewal form and a USPS Priority Mail shipping label to be affixed to a 9 x 12 envelope. The user fills out the renewal form, puts it in the envelope with his most recent passport and then drops it in any mailbox.

The State Department charges $110 to renew a passport within the standard time frame (about six weeks, according to Cocks), and $170 for an expedited one. There’s an additional service fee of $29.95 if you use the ItsEasy app.

ItsEasy provides some nifty services for free, though. “If you submit your email address and your passport’s expiration date, we will send you a reminder nine months before your passport expires,” Alwadish said.

The app also has a panic button. “In the event that your passport is lost or stolen, we provide step-by-step instructions on what to do if you’re abroad or in the United States.”

Uncle Sam’s best advice for passport holders? Don’t wait until the last minute to renew.

“Applying early will allow you to save the additional $60 expedite fee,” said Cocks. “If you have a valid passport, be sure to check its expiration date before you make travel reservations. Some countries will not let you enter if your passport will expire in fewer than six months.”

By Suzanne Rowan Kelleher, the family vacations expert at About.com.

Friday, December 25, 2015

12 Travel Apps Worth Keeping In 2016

Recently I deleted dozens of travel apps from my iPhone. Many are great. They allowed me to research unfamiliar places, listen to audio tours and turn my photos into postcards. But travel is about tapping the world, not a screen, so I’m ending the year with an app purge. I’ve kept only what I use often. An app didn’t have to be new (most weren’t) to make the cut, but it had to make travel easier or significantly more enjoyable. Below are a dozen that have earned a spot on my smartphone heading into 2016.

LiveTrekker This French app is a dream for flâneurs who love to wander without a map and yet, later, long to see where they’ve been. The app logs how far you walk, but I’m hooked on the red line it draws up and down each street, and through every park and museum you visit. Before setting off, tap the “tracker” button and then “start.” When you’ve returned to your hotel hours later, you’ll have a detailed, zoomable map (the satellite version that allows you to see trees and landmarks is a favorite) of where you’ve walked that you can also view on a computer and share with friends. I’ve used LiveTrekker to see how much of a city I’ve explored, and to note the little streets I strolled down whose names I might otherwise have forgotten. Cost: free.

Bravolol This app brand puts basic phrases and vocabulary — “Thank you,” “How much?,” “A table for two, please” — at your fingertips. Each (in my case) English phrase is shown in the foreign language and sometimes as a transliteration, too. Even better: Tap a phrase, and the app speaks it aloud so you know how to pronounce it. There are a variety of languages available, including French, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Portuguese, Russian and Arabic. Cost: free for basic categories, and $4.99 for additional categories such as “driving” and “sightseeing.”

Duolingo If you want to begin studying a language but don’t have the time, money or inclination for classes, you can learn during your commute or waiting in line at the supermarket with this app, which turns language learning into a game of multiple choice questions, word matching quizzes and translation challenges. Answer correctly and, like a video game, you can proceed to the next category. Courses are available in languages including Spanish, French, Italian, German and Portuguese. Cost: free.

Vurb One of the newer travel apps out there, Vurb allows you to access all your favorite workhorse apps in a single place. You can search for or discover destinations and events, and then do all the things you would normally do for an afternoon in a city — make a reservation on OpenTable (see below), buy movie tickets on Fandango, check out a location on Google Maps (below), request a car through Lyft or Uber (below), look at Yelp reviews or Foursquare tips, chat with your friends — all without closing Vurb and opening a half dozen other apps. (You give Vurb permission to open your various apps.) For instance, let’s say you opened Vurb and searched for an Italian restaurant. After you select one and tap on its virtual address and information card, you’ll see icons for popular apps like OpenTable, Google Maps, Safari and Uber. You can then tap one after another to quickly make a reservation, get directions and request a car without having to hunt for and open multiple apps. Cost: free.

Apple iBooks This is an often-overlooked native iPhone app. A virtual library of your own creation, it allows you to highlight favorite passages, add notes and tap a button to send yourself or someone else favorite quotes and passages from the digital books you’re reading. You can download a travel guide or take a bookshelf’s worth of classics with you to London. Poetry by Keats, Longfellow and Elizabeth Barrett Browning can be downloaded free. You can increase the font size, and an option to darken the pages is handy if you want to read in your hotel bed while your partner is sleeping. Cost: free (you pay for most books you download).

NOAA Radar Pro This weather app has more bells and whistles than anyone needs, but it’s also more accurate than other weather apps I’ve tried. It’s easy to scroll through hourly and weekly forecasts. You can customize the order in which you see forecasts for things like precipitation, wind, visibility and what the temperature feels like. And you can bookmark multiple places where you want to regularly check the weather. Cost: free for basic version; $1.99 for pro, which is ad-free and has seven-day forecasts (instead of three), severe-weather notifications and a hurricane tracker.

Google Maps and Google Translate Easy to use, with turn-by-turn voice navigation and clean lines, Google Maps is my first map stop. And now that there’s also offline navigation, you won’t incur roaming charges. Cost: free. Google Translate can be used in various ways. For example, you can tap the camera icon on your phone and then hold it up to a menu and see a translation. You can get translations of words that you speak, type or draw on your smartphone screen with your finger. The app is also capable of real-time translation while two people converse. I try to muddle through in a foreign language as much as possible, but it’s comforting to know that in a pinch I’ve got a translator in my pocket. Cost: free.

XE Currency For some people, currency conversion is a breeze. For the rest of us, there are apps. This one updates in real time, can display multiple currencies simultaneously, and the price is right. Cost: free (a pro version for $2.29 allows you to monitor more currencies).

TripIt This travel organizer allows members to forward their various hotel, flight, car rental, concert and restaurant confirmation email to a single address and in return receive a digital itinerary. I’m even more impressed with the app’s ability to alert me to gate changes before an airline’s app. Cost: free; $49 a year for the pro version that includes flight, seat and fare refund alerts and allows you to keep track of your rewards points and miles.

OpenTable This popular app and reward program lets you browse restaurants both casual and costly, and then book with a few taps. Users earn points for dining (a typical reservation earns 100 points), which can then be exchanged for discounts at participating restaurants or an Amazon gift card. For example, 2,000 points gets you $20 toward a meal or a $10 Amazon card. This can add up, especially if you book regularly, even when you know your favorite local joint isn’t crowded. Cost: free.

Uber Love or hate the company, this app is indispensable on rainy days and late nights when mass transit is inconvenient and there isn’t a cab in sight. In cities like Los Angeles, it’s made doing without a rental car an option. And of course you don’t have to worry about having enough cash on hand because its linked to your credit card. Cost: free.

Stephanie Rosenbloom

THE GETAWAY

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Paris Launches 'Yes I Speak Touriste' App

PARIS, France - A new mobile app has been launched to help tourists visiting Paris find areas of the French capital where their native tongue will be understood.

'Yes I speak touriste' has been launched to help foreigners struggling with their French find some respite.

The app provides users with an interactive map showing locations like restaurants and hotels where their respective language is spoken.

Users select their preferred language and locations appear where they can find fellow Mandarin, Arabic and English speakers.

Selecting Mandarin, for example, and around 20 addresses pop up, including a pharmacy.

The French capital's chamber of commerce released the app, which is available in nine languages, at the start of the peak summer tourism season.

Along with the app, there is a paper guide and a website with a list of locations compiled by the chamber of commerce and the regional tourism board.

The website, called 'Do you speak touriste?' also offers businesses personality profiles for different nationalities.

According to the profiles, Russian tourists are 'traditional and passionate', and Chinese are 'serial shoppers and connected'.

Now, the service has moved to mobile, and is available free of charge for Android and iOS phones.

Paris consistently ranks as the most visited city in the world, with 46 million visitors - 58 per cent French and 42 per cent international - each year, according to the chamber of commerce.

The organization said 'the perception of the destination by tourists is positive, with a satisfaction level of 94 per cent in 2014'.

Not all tourists are satisfied, though. Japanese reported 58 percent satisfaction, and Chinese 54 percent - with security an issue.

'Cultivating hospitality shows the world that each visitor is welcomed. It also encourages jobs and growth,' the statement said.