Safe Arrival
Built for the 30 minutes after you land, and for the day it goes wrong.
The half hour after an aircraft door opens is the single worst connectivity window of a trip. You are between networks, the airport wifi wants an email address, the queue for a SIM shop is 40 minutes long, and everything you need to know is on a website you cannot reach. Safe Arrival is the part of the app that assumes all of that and works anyway.
The offline city pack
Pick a city and tap download, ideally on hotel or home wifi before you fly. What lands is between 12 and 30 MB depending on the city, which is smaller than one high resolution photo of it. Inside are four things chosen because they are what people actually open.
A vector map of the centre, with streets, transit stops, pharmacies, hospitals and 24 hour shops, that pans and zooms with the radio off. The official metro or transit map as the operator draws it, because the local diagram is the one the signs match. The airport to city routes: which train, which platform, which bus stand, what it costs, how long it takes and when the last one runs, which is the question that turns a cheap arrival into a $90 taxi. And 30 phrases that matter, written phonetically as well as in script, weighted towards pharmacy, allergy, police and where is.
The pack is versioned and refreshes when you are next on wifi. It never refreshes itself over your travel data, because spending your gigabytes to update a map you are currently standing in front of would be a poor trade.
12 to 30 MB
a city pack, downloaded on wifi, usable with the radio off
100 MB
free rescue data a month on every account, in 200 plus countries
1 Mbps
the speed location share is designed to survive
Emergency numbers, for the country you are in
Most travellers carry one emergency number in their head and it is the one from home. That is a genuine risk, because the number that works in Chicago does nothing in Bangkok. The app shows the right numbers for your current country on the home screen, in large type, tappable, with no lookup and no connection required.
| Where you are | Police | Ambulance | Fire |
|---|---|---|---|
| Across the European Union | 112 | 112 | 112 |
| United Kingdom | 999 or 112 | 999 or 112 | 999 or 112 |
| United States and Canada | 911 | 911 | 911 |
| Japan | 110 | 119 | 119 |
| South Korea | 112 | 119 | 119 |
| China | 110 | 120 | 119 |
| Thailand | 191 | 1669 | 199 |
| Australia | 000 | 000 | 000 |
| New Zealand | 111 | 111 | 111 |
| United Arab Emirates | 999 | 998 | 997 |
| Brazil | 190 | 192 | 193 |
| India | 112 | 112 | 112 |
One thing worth memorising anyway: 112 is reachable on almost every GSM network on earth, including from a handset with no account, and in a large part of the world it will route you to the right service even where a different local number is standard. It is the closest thing there is to a universal number and it costs nothing to remember.
Your embassy, cached before you need it
Set your nationality once. From then on, in every country you land in, the app holds a card with your embassy or nearest consulate: street address, the map pin, the switchboard number, the out of hours emergency line, opening hours and the local time right now so you know whether they are open. All of it is stored offline, because the day you need an embassy is not reliably a day you have a working connection or a wallet.
Each card carries the date it was last verified against published consular listings. If that date is more than 90 days old we mark it as unverified rather than showing it as fact. A confidently wrong phone number is worse than an obviously stale one.
Taxi guidance, which is mostly a pricing problem
Airport transport is where travellers are overcharged more than anywhere else on a trip, and it happens in the first hour, when you are least able to judge. The app gives you three things per airport. Where the official rank actually is, which is frequently past the group of people offering you a ride. The going rate to the city centre as a range, so you can tell the difference between a fair fare and three times one. And which ride apps genuinely work locally, which is a real question: Grab in much of Southeast Asia, Bolt across large parts of Europe and Africa, Didi in China and Mexico, and in Japan the answer is usually a metered taxi or the train rather than an app at all.
Where a fixed price counter exists, we say so and tell you to use it. Where the meter is the honest option, we say that instead. It is a short list per airport and it is written to be read while walking.
Live location share
You create a link and send it to one person. They open it in a browser with nothing to install. They see your position on a map, the time of the last update, and your battery percentage, which is the piece of information that changes how someone reads a silence.
You set the expiry when you create it, from 15 minutes to 24 hours, and you can end it early at any time. When it ends, the link stops resolving and the trail is not kept. The payload is a few hundred bytes per update, so it keeps working on a congested network, on rescue data, and at the 1 Mbps floor an unlimited pass drops to after 2 GB in a day. That last detail is deliberate. A location share that only works on a good connection is a location share that fails precisely when it is needed.
Where to set it up
Safe Arrival is included on every account at no extra cost, including accounts that have only ever used the free 100 MB. Download the city packs for your route the night before you fly. If you want to see which networks you will be on when you land, that is on coverage. To browse what is live, see destinations, and to buy balance that does not expire between trips, the store is the place.