With the worst of the pandemic seemingly over and vaccination fully underway, many European countries are planning to lift the quarantine limitations to tourists with vaccination passports. Thus, the tourism industry is preparing to rise anew like a phoenix from the ashes. Booking plane/train tickets, hotel rooms, and cars are going to rebound soon.

Thus, many startups entertain the thought of developing a booking platform to ride this hype wave. If you are such a startup, keep on reading to get an overview of the current market leaders, their most useful features and real-life booking software development examples from Spintech.

10 popular booking apps in Europe

Without much ado, here are the top 10 most downloaded and widely used booking apps in the EU as of 2021:

• Omio(former GoEuro) — a ticket price comparison platform, helping backpack travelers get cheap tickets across the EU. A web and a mobile app allow comparing the prices, planning the route and tracking it with ease.
• Rome2Rio — another route planner app. Unlike Omio, it does not provide exact pricing, but it allows selecting the best among all the possible plane, train, bus, car, and ferry routes between any two points.
• Skyscanner — is the go-to app for planning a trip, as it allows finding the cheapest flight tickets, hotel rooms, and car rentals, allowing to compare a wide range of services within one platform.
  One of Skyscanner’s most prominent features is the open date search, showing you the best ticket deals in any location for a given month, which is great for digital nomads, who migrate whenever and wherever they want.
• HousingAnywhere — a popular student-oriented global platform for long-term room rentals and listing own rooms for rent built with tourist/student convenience in mind. This means lots of filters to form the listings, convenient payment methods to confirm the booking at once, and real-time updates of the available room lists to ensure the users can view the recently added rooms sooner. Using our expertise, the customer developed this platform to be a tool of choice for housing management.
• Flixbus — a German bus operator offering the biggest number of cheap bus rides across the EU. Bus ticket booking, alert on delays, bus tracking and many more options make this app the favorite one for countless backpack travelers across 29 countries in Europe.

• BlaBlaCar — the famous carpooling platform, allowing the drivers to offer free cabin space in exchange for gas cost payments. This allows traveling much cheaper than using a plane or train, and much faster than on a bus — while chatting with new people and making friends on every trip.
  The most requested BlaBlaCar features are requesting custom rides for drivers to accept and creating alerts once somebody agrees to join the ride.
• CityMapper — a great app for using public transport systems across Europe. It allows building routes in new cities using local public fares and enables the users to save the data offline to be available later. This way, tourists can be sure they will not get lost even without having to join local mobile carrier networks, using just public Wi-Fi spots to download city maps and plan their routes.
• Google Maps — the most popular map, route, and reviewing app worldwide. “Street view” allows comparing the location with your surroundings, “Explore” helps find the best shop or cafe based on customer reviews and a built-in public transportation mapper helps build the routes in any location.
• Uber — we don’t think we need to introduce you to the most popular car-sharing app around. With Uber, you can catch a ride almost anywhere in the EU, and Uber Eats delivers food in all major cities.
• SettleIn — this neat little platform is the tool of choice for company transfers and relocations. Unlike the majority of booking tools, oriented at single users for long-term (students) or short-term (tourists) room rentals, this app is built for professionals with families. Relocating to a new country or city with a spouse and kids can be a nightmare for any professional, but SettleIn from Spintech solves the challenge.
  The platform is configured to list only the properties rented for families and provides a ton of useful features for HR specialists, allowing them to enable a smooth landing for every new company employee. Due to integration with various calendars and the ability to create customizable alerts for any occasion, SettleIn can become your best friend when planning and executing the relocation.

Naturally, this is merely the tip of the iceberg, as there are booking apps in other languages tailored for various purposes. The market is recovering from the pandemic and new opportunities arise daily.

Should you want to benefit from launching such an innovative solution soon — you will need access to a solid booking platform development. Spintech is ready to provide such access, so let us know what you need and we will help you turn a project into a real app!