Can technology improve your trip? Meet Judy Williams. When she and her husband recently checked into Blu Hotel in Zurich, a clerk asked them to sign the dotted line on a room rate hundreds of dollars higher than their online offer. "It was not a cheap stay," says Williams, a lawyer from Billings, Mont. But it became more of one after her husband fired up the Booking.com app he'd used to book their room on his smart phone. "As soon as we showed him the cost, he honored it," Williams says. Technology may create challenges for travelers but it can also solve them. It's more than making sure of a hotel cost. The latest Booking.com can help users select hotels by location, make a secure booking and view the confirmed   cost so they never need to re-discuss their hotel price. Another pain point for travelers is traffic that eats away precious vacation time. There's a new app called Commute which is aimed at users who have to make the same trip every day. But if you're headed to Los Angeles or Honolulu, where visitors can easily get stuck in hours of heavy traffic, Commute can help. Just input basic information about your destination and expected leaving time, and the app will start sending you traffic information 15 minutes before you leave. Testing Commute proved to be a challenge for me, because my home address is about 900 miles from my place of work. But if you have only a short distance to travel through a heavily populated area, you can use Commute to avoid traffic jams. Another source of travel-related problems is money. That's particularly true when you're dealing with a foreign currency. The latest Travel Money Tracker helps travelers prevent currency mix-ups. It immediately changes a country's native currency to yours, so you know exactly how much that Espresso   in Milan costs in dollars. It can also warn you when you're overspending, which can sometimes be a problem when you're on vacation. The only catch, of course, is that you have to remember to record all your purchases. Taken together, these apps solve some of the most common travel problems. But not all of them. Some things, no smart phone can fix, which means I get to keep my job - for now at least. What is the purpose of this passage?
To encourage people to travel. To introduce some new apps. To help people with technology problems. To provide people with traveling information.