Must Have Apps For Travel To China

Booking travel and navigating in a foreign country can be complicated, especially when you don’t know the language. You might think the only way you could visit China is if you take an organized tour, but thanks to modern-day technology, this is not true. With only the help of the internet, I organized a trip to Chongqing – Zhangjiajie – Xi’an for six people and you can too. 

The following applications were a godsend in exploring China and making my plans. Be sure to download these applications in advance, because most popular western applications, including the Play Store, are blocked in China.

• Windscribe –  The first thing you want to do before leaving for China is to download a good VPN. A VPN is required to use your favourite websites such as Gmail, Google Maps, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Now, there are lots of VPN choices out there, but not all of them work in China. The one I chose to use is Windscribe because the free version can be used for 10GB of data per month. It is also user-friendly. When I was in China, it worked well. However, not all of their server locations worked perfectly all of the time, so if you are having some difficulty with it, pick a different server location. They have 10 free server locations to chose from, the Germany location worked well for me. 
• WeChat – This is the primary application used to communicate between individuals as well as with businesses. This app can also link to a Chinese bank account or Credit Card. Locals use WeChat to pay for almost everything. In most countries, cash is king, but not in China. In China, many places do not accept cash, most accept credit cards, but everyone accepts payment via WeChat or Alipay… even the homeless. Bonus, WeChat now allows foreigners to link their credit cards to the application! When I visited with my family in April 2019, this was not possible yet. Because of this, when we visited the Zhangjiajie National Park we were unable to pay for luggage storage at the park. The storage safes only accepted WeChat. We ended up storing our bags at a nearby hotel. The bags were placed under a net in the main lobby of the hotel, not exactly secure. Thankfully, nothing was stolen. We did, however, use the communication portion of the app to liaison with our Airbnb hosts and a couple of friendly locals we met on the trip.  
• Alipay – Alipay is a payment application similar to WeChat. At the time of writing, WeChat is used more often, but most vendors accept both. If you only want one payment application, I would go with WeChat because of it’s dual use. 

Note: I’ve even begun seeing WeChat and Alipay used in Canada. For example, a few luxury dealerships in Canada accept this form of payment as a draw-in for their Chinese customers (and now you). 

• Apple Maps – If you are an iPhone user, Apple maps works well in China. 
• Autonavi Navigation– If you have an Android like me, finding a good mapping application for China is difficult. Most Google applications do not work in China, including Google Maps, so I downloaded Autonavi. Autonavi is a Chinese maps application that supports the English language. According to the internet the most popular app is Baidu, but I couldn’t find this on the play store and unless you can type in Chinese characters… it is useless. Regardless, I still found it difficult to navigate in China with Autonavi because 90% of the destinations are written in Chinese characters only. Another option is to turn on your VPN and continue using Google Maps. Google doesn’t have the most accurate data for China, but at least you can search and find popular destinations in English characters. However, since you needed a VPN to use it, Google Maps had difficulty pinpointing my exact location. I often switched back and forth between Autonavi and Google. 

Note: to make their country more secure, China prevents foreign mapping companies from acquiring and sharing accurate GPS coordinates. Fun fact, if you go on any mapping application and compare the satellite image with the destinations, everything will be a little askew.

• Booking – Booking is a popular app used for booking accommodations all around the world, including China. Some hotels (especially crappy hotels) are not allowed to host foreigners. I learnt this the hard way by booking an Airbnb in an apartment complex for locals that we were not supposed to stay in. It worked out in the end, but we were given a hard time by the building security guard. Also, I noticed from my Airbnb that the standards of a “nice place” is set pretty low in China. Our Airbnb in Chongqing looked fantastic in the pictures, it had countless great reviews from Chinese people, but in reality, it was dirty and uncomfortable. For this reason, I would stick to your regular, trusted booking methods rather than trying to use the local ones. I encountered great prices on Booking and there were lots of wonderful options to chose from.
• Trip.com (CTrip) – There are multiple ways to book train tickets in China online, most of which require a service fee. The official way is via the website www.12306.cn, but this website requires a Chinese credit card and it is difficult for us foreigners to navigate. For this reason, I recommend using Trip.com. For train travel, Trip.com charges a service fee of 40CNY (about $8CAD) for the first ticket and 20CNY for all the tickets thereafter. This is pretty average, and for the convenience of the website, I think it’s worth it. You can also use Trip.com to book train travel, flights, explore attractions, book tours, etc. 
• Google Translate – One Google application that does work in China is Google Translate! I was worried that it wouldn’t work so I also downloaded the Huawei translation app, but Google Translate definitely worked better. It was essential for translating menus and I often used it to communicate with locals by passing my phone back and forth. One thing I wish I did was add the Chinese keyboard to my phone, this way the locals could have switched to Chinese characters for typing and I could rely a little less on the voice translation. Applications like Gboard and Swiftkey have a Chinese keyboard that you can add, or you can download a more specific application like Google Pinyin Input. The voice translation for Google Maps does not work well in noisy areas or when I had limited data connection.

I hope that this blog post was useful to you. Subscribe below if you would like to receive updates for future blog posts! My next blog post will be a  Two Week Itinerary for China – Chongqing, Zhangjiajie, and Xi’an.