• by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, December 14, 2016

There will be plenty of travel this holiday season and many of the people doing that traveling will be leaning on their mobile apps.

Holiday travelers will be using their apps pretty much all the way through their trip to make their travel less stressful and more manageable, based on a new study.

Apps are going to be used for everything from searching for and booking flights to checking in and letting friends and family know the status, based on the survey of 1,000 U.S. adults conducted by Sequence.

Mobile apps that help travelers along include those that can be used to book flights and get alerts for upgrades. Here are the digital tools that consumers say helps them make holiday travel less stressful and more manageable:

• 57% -- Mobile app or text alerts on flight status, including delays
• 51% -- Weather apps to track weather for potential delays
• 48% -- Apps for mobile boarding
• 33% -- Texting or chat app
• 29% -- Mobile travel booking apps to book flight
• 24% -- Mobile airline app that alerts to upgrade status

Travelers may be quite happy to have their apps since various issues associated with air travel can cause some serious headaches. Most consumers see as the most stressful parts of holiday air travel long security lines, weather delays, long check-in lines and flight cancelations.

While mobile apps won’t alleviate some of the travel issues, they will at least show consumers what they’re facing, in many cases, in advance.

After many years of evolution, airline apps have very much arrived. The majority (63%) of consumers now find airline apps easy to use.

However, there’s a long list of consumer desires for future airline app development. Here’s what consumers would like their airline mobile app to do that it is not doing today:

• 44% -- Automatically alert another airline if there’s a delay that could cause a missed connection
• 37% -- Alert friends and family on flight status, including when landed
• 32% -- Alert for promotions, like flight deals
• 27% -- Automatically alert rental car companies of my flight delays
• 24% -- Improve searching for and booking my flights
• 24% -- Track where friends and family are within an airport

Even while consumers may want some additional features in airline apps, they are active in features that already exist. The app features used the most are for checking flight status and advisories, using the mobile boarding pass feature and checking in for a flight.

The least used features are changing seats, requesting an upgrade or paying for one and for entertainment such as streaming video during a flight.

It wasn’t in this particular survey, but plenty of holiday travelers also can be expected to be speaking on their smartphones during their holiday trips.