Getting Travel Deals
Sep 6th, 2007 by Vinny
There are now thousands of travel websites on the web. Here are some of the best in my opinion, and how to use them to your advantage.
If you are looking for the best Hotel or Airfare, you can use the newer type search engines. These will scour the web for rates from the airlines own home pages (nwa.com, southwest.com), and all the major travel sites like Orbitz, Travelocity, etc.
It doesn’t hurt to check all of the following links, chances are you can find an airfare and a flight time that you can deal with.
If you don’t have a specific time to fly, then try the generic searches. They allow you to find the cheapest deals for a range of dates.
Search engines (try all of them):
- Kayak.com -best in my opinion, can narrow your search very easily (time, price, stops) and it does hotels as well as cars and more.
- Mobissimo.com -similar to Kayak, not as nice of a layout but can have different results.
- Sidestep.com - this one is new to me so I haven’t used it yet, but it looks like it is very well laid out.
Standard searches:
It doesn’t hurt to also run searches on the main sites, some might reserve fares when only searched on their page. Most of them can also do vacation packages which can be handy.
Last minute travel:
These are handy if you need to travel now, or just want to get away this weekend. Most do not work for more than a couple weeks ahead of time. You can usually find good deals through the search engines as well for last minutes things.
Smaller airlines:
There can be a lot of airlines that fly out of your local airports that offer cheap rates. These are also nice since you don’t have the large airport crazy-ness that plagues most of the U.S. A carrier that flies locally to me is Alligiant Air. Check the billboards when you are driving and you will find one. Jetblue is another smaller airline.
Miscellaneous travel sites:
- Farecast.com – if you want to keep an eye out for the cheapest rates to a specific destination, or from your hometown, run a search agent on this site. They try to forecast if the fares will go up or down based on past data. Very neat site with alot of potential for deals.
- Seatguru.com – this site is always consulted before I book a seat on a plane. The user comments are great since they are putting seats in more and more places (like right next to the bathroom).
- Artoftravel.com – good info on back packing and everything about travel.
- Gridskipper.com – great travel destination information site, geared towards cities.
- Pleasantholidays.com – destination package deal site
- Lonelyplanet.com – Can’t forget this site, great source of information about every destination. Read the user comments for great suggestions.
If there is anything missing on my list and you have had a good experience with it, shoot me a request!
