5 Best Apps for Travel to Chile
Welcome to Chile! Or should we say Bien Venido a Chile, the most prosperous and expensive country in South America. Famous sights include Patagonia of the Andes Mountains, Easter Island, Valle de la Luna in the Atacama Desert and Torres del Paine Glacier. Chile extends 4,270 km from North to South and varies from temperate rain forests, to deserts, ice-peaked mountains and sunshine coasts. We’ve picked out the best apps to help you explore this vast and stunning country!
Apps for discovering new sights, destinations, learning Spanish and booking bus tickets, taxis, ubers, bikes and more! If you know of other apps we should include, let us know on Twitter! See our honourable mentions for more great apps I really enjoyed for music, architecture & Easter Island!
1. South America Journey
The South America Journey app is a collection of photos organized by location. It’s like an app of instagram photos but only for awesome places in South America. The app will track your location and show you cool places nearby. It’s a great tool to find interesting desitnation you might want to visit on your next trip to Chile.
Each photo has a small description but it’s not a guide. The app claims to show the real deal, not some snippet of a photo designed for publication or for likes on social media. What you see in the photos is what you get upon your visit. Use this app to brainstorm things to do!
- Price: Free, in app purchases
- App Rating: 10/10
- Alternatives: Chile 360
Chile 360
I always like to look for the official travel apps. Many countries have tourism boards or government departments aimed at promoting tourism. Chile 360 is an app developed by Imagen de Chile in partnership with Servator, the National Tourism Service of Chile.
Chile 360 is also a photo collection with a viewable map with pins of the best tourist attractions in Chile. The app also has videos of excursions like horseback riding in Aysen or hiking through Torres del Paine. You can bookmark the places you’d like to visit and download the photos to your phone.
- Price: Free
- App Rating: 7/10 – it crashes occasionally
- Alternatives: South America Journey
2. SpanishDict Translator
Chile has a booming tourism industry but English is still relatively uncommon. Readers might recognize SpanishDict Translator from my Cuba app. I recommend it again for Chile. Now, I understand that Spanish in Chile is very different from Spain or Mexico Spanish…
There are a lot of great translators apps but few that have downloadable dictionaries that work with full phrases. I tried a few and preferred Spanish Dict. because of the easily accessible phrase list. But I recommend picking up a Lonely Planet Spanish Phrasebook as your primary dictionary.
- Price: Free, In App Purcahses
- App Rating: 8/10
- Alternative: Google Translate, Microsoft Translate
Duolingo- Spanish
Spanish is a great language to learn for international travel. It’s considered the second most spoken native language in the world with 400 million+ speakers.
So learning a little bit of Spanish is great for any future trips to South, & Central America, Spain and even parts of the United States. Duolingo is one of my favorite language learning apps, I used Memrise a lot for Japanese too. However I found the lessons on Duolingo easier to load without internet.
- Price: Free
- App Rating: 10/10
- Alternative: Memrise
3. Accurate Altimeter
One of the biggest attractions in Chile are the Andes Mountains that define the country’s borders, climate and natural landscape. From the stunning ice-fields and glaciers of Patagonia in the south, to the high altitude desert salt flats in the north, your adventures are sure to take you to great heights.
Altitude sickness can affect travellers as they quickly move from the coasts to the interior mountains and plateaus. Accurate Altimeter and other baro-meter apps are very handy, they provide maps of the region and charts on your altitude gain during your hikes and excursions. Unfortunately this one isn’t available for iPhone but other apps like Travel Altimeter or My Altitude are on iOS
- Price: Free, Paid Pro Version
- App Rating: 7/10
- Alternatives: My Elevation, Altimeter
4. Recorrido.cl Bus Tickets
Recorrido is a bus ticket booking and comparison app for Chile. It’s like BusBud but only for Latin America. The app is available in English and is widely used in Chile. Search for long-distance bus tickets of all the operators at once. You’ll see the times of arrival, departure, price, terminal, operator and rating all listed conveniently.
The app uses Webpay and Paypal (both accept international credit cards). You can always use the app to search for routes and operators and then book in person at the terminal or on the bus operator’s website.
- Price: In App Purchases Bookings
- App Rating: 9/10
- Alternatives: Busbud
Transantiago Bus Checker
While the recorrido app is useful for getting between cities, bus checker is your go to app for getting around by local bus and subway in Santiago. It’s a simple app for one purpose, taking the bus.
The app functions in the same way as Google Maps. Set a departure, destination and you’ll be given a list of options with estimates of how long each will take. Set an alert to be notified when you’ve arrived or need to change subway lines. The app doesn’t include the cost of taking the bus or subway, but does include downloadable maps of the transit system (buses & subway lines) for offline use in Santiago.
- Price: Free
- App Rating: 6/10
- Alternatives: Google Maps, Transit
5. BEAT Ride App
Beat Ride is exactly like Uber. Beat launched in 2011 but only operates in a handful of cities, one of them being Santiago. They offer great rates and aggressively hire drivers so you won’t have any difficulty finding a ride. They also operate in Bogota, Colombia and Lima, Peru. Beat doesn’t charge surge pricing like Uber does until it is well established in the city, so it can be much cheaper than Uber.
The nice feature of Beat is the no cancellation fee. If the driver assigned to pick you up cancels, or you change your mind, there is no fee charged to you.
- Price: In App Purchases
- App Rating: 8/10
- Alternatives: Uber, Cabify, DiDi, Easy Taxi
UBER
Uber is the king of Ridesharing. Uber is well established in Santiago and other cities in Chile. Many tourists wonder if they should grab an Uber from the airport in Santiago, and how much they cost? A bus is available from $4 USD, a taxi runs from $15 USD in low traffic to $23 USD in normal traffic. An Uber ride to downtown is roughly $19 USD.
Taxis in Chile are quite cheap. A ride within the city can cost as low as $3 USD and are easily accessible. Uber is priced to compete.
Booking a ride through an app is recommended as all the rates are fixed. You don’t have to worry about being scammed or over-charged. The other advantage as a traveller is that Uber doesn’t require cash, everything is charged through the app. I find cash runs out fast, so using credit is big plus.
- Price: In App Purchases
- App Rating: 10/10
- Alternatives: Beat, Cabify, DiDi, Easy Taxi
Lime Bike Share in Santiago
Bike sharing has exploded and then quickly imploded around the world. The growth of bike shares has been nothing short of crazy to watch. There are bike graveyards in China as companies dumped thousands of dockless bikes onto the sidewalks making them unwalkable! And yet, bikes as a form of active transportation have tremendous benefits to health and the environment. Slowly regulations are being implemented to make the industry less chaotic and sustainable.
Lime is a bike and electric scooter sharing app that has recently launched in Santiago Chile. The app requires a data plan and credit card to load funds onto the wallet and unlock the scooters. Otherwise, it’s easy to use. Just open the app, find a scooter nearby and scan to unlock it.
While I appreciate the service, I don’t believe the scooters should be dockless, because they’ll get dumped in a mess or set on fire. There is even an entire instagram account with 77.4k followers dedicated to their destruction. They need to be docked neatly, I’ve experienced the dockless chaos in China and it’s awful.
Cycle Finder is a Canadian bike share that has recently launched (February 1st, 2019) 3,500 bikes & e-bikes in Santiago. They must be picked up and returned to a docking station that is solar powered. They also have a commitment to sustainable urban transportation, hopefully they’ll manage their fleet of bikes much better than the bankrupt Chinese companies.
- Price: In App Purchases
- App Rating: 8/10
- Alternatives: Cycle Finder (iOS), BikeSantiago
Honourable Mentions
Chile Arch (Architecture)
Chile Arch is a simply app with few features. It has a list of buildings and architectural attractions across Chile with photos and a brief description. Some descriptions are in English, others in Spanish. They tell the story of the building, structure and architects who built them. It’s a cool, simple app.
For architecture lovers, It’s a great little app to download for a self-guided walking tour of the local sights in Chile. Santiago especially has a lot of pins of famous buildings to view. Use the map page to see what is nearby.
- Price: Free
- App Rating: 5/10
- Alternatives: None
Imagina Easter Island
Imagina Easter Island or Isla de Pascua is available on Android and iOS in English. It’s a great app for your visit to Easter Island! The app includes everything from documents & requirements, getting around, money, where to get internet, accommodations and tours. They even have special offers like 10% off all tours from Maururu Travel and 1 free pisco sour at Kai Mana Restobar.
They include details like; a taxi to Anakena Beach costs $25 and the pick up must be coordinated in advance since there is almost no cellphone reception across the island (mostly hardline). The app also has a guide on weather, seasonal temperatures and recommendations for the best time of year to visit: High season runs from December to March.
This app is great, the information is clear, up to date and who doesn’t love special offers!10/10.
- Price: Free
- App Rating: 10/10
- Alternatives: Triposo Chile, Tripwolf Chle
Radio Chile
To round out our list, I couldn’t resist sharing this Radio Chile app. The best travel is when you feel immersed in a new culture. Listening to the Chilean radio is fun and an opportunity to enjoy Chilean culture even before you arrive and after you depart. I don’t speak Spanish beyond the basic phrases I use for traveling but I enjoy the music and the good vibes. It’s way better than Canadian music!
In the app you can choose to listen to a local radio station in Chile. Here are some of my favorites:
- Radio Uno- Musica Chilena
- Radio Placeres
- Radio Libra
- Radio Sol
- el Conquistador
I hope you download this app and enjoy it like I did! Viva Chile!
- Price: Free
- App Rating: 8/10
- Alternatives: Radio Chile Online
Disclaimer: Amazon and Trip.com are affiliate partners, we make a small commission on any purchases at no cost to you.
More Info on Chile
We are currently building out our content on Chile and other countries in South America. We had our first guest writer, Maria Peinador share her experience in San Pedro de Atacama, North Chile. We have two more articles from Maria to come, stay tuned.
Do check out our other travel articles on 5 Hostel Essentials, 5 Travel Essentials, & Best Maps Apps . We also dived into the big question, to GoPro or not? What video camera is right for you and what you need to know before you buy. I’ve been getting into video more and more, so be sure to follow us on Instagram & Twitter for future articles.
