I always book our own travel and I've collected a few sites that I use. Most of the sites
here I have personally used. A few are recommended by the
Frugal Traveler Blog.
- Kayak
-
A great site for searching for flights. I absolutely love the side filters.
- Hipmunk
-
A very cool way of searching for flights. The interface is probably the best view of flights. Its Gantt chart like
display is intuitive and allows the user to quickly and easily see all of the available flights.
- Southwest
- SouthWest doesn't allow other sites to index their site, so you have to go
to southwest.com on your own.
- Momondo
- Another meta-search engine like Kayak. Some
people prefer Momondo, but I don't.
Momondo does seem to have better low-cost
European coverage than Kayak.
- Bing Travel
- Bing uses historical data to predict if the price of a flight will change. It is
fairly accurate. I check if I am on the fence about buying.
- ITA
- ITA is the software that powers most online search engines. This is a direct vein
into their data. The original version was almost unusable; this one has a much cleaner
and easier to use interface.
- Vayama
- Vayama specializes in international flights
- wegolol
- wegolo is a meta-search engine for low cost European carriers
- Seat Expert
-
Seat Expert is easier to use than Seat Guru;
it allows you to search by your flight. It takes the guessing work out of the equation.
Seat Guru seems to have more information, but I check
Seat Expert first.
- Seat Guru
-
SeatGuru has a a detail layout of practically every plane (maybe all) used today. It has
lots of great information.
- airlinequality.com
-
airlinequality.com has reviews of airplanes,
airports, airlines, etc.
- yapta
- yapta tracks price changes for
flights and hotels. They claim to be able to get refund vouchers; I haven't
tried this yet. I am just tracking flights that we may take next year.
- Kayak
-
A great site for searching for hotels too.
- DealBase
- I haven't used DealBase yet, but it looks good.
- TravelAxe
- TravelAxe is now also a web based application. It does a very nice job
of searching many hotel sites.
- hotels.com
- I use hotels.com for reading hotel review mostly. I haven't booked
here yet.
- Vegas Resort Fees
- A comprehensive list of Vegas hotel resort fees.
- TripIt
- Online free service that keeps all of the your itinerary in one convenient place. TripIt integrates with GMail, so
you no longer have to forward emails. TripIt will automatically detect new travel related emails in your GMail inbox.
TripIt is one of the best websites and iPhone apps, highly recommended.
- TravelMuse
-
TravelMuse bills itself as a travel planning organizer. The site mostly works, but I have
run into some small snags. TravelMuse allows you to save your travel information
in a single place. It is an improvement over my use of Google Bookmarks.
- Trip Advisor
- Trip Advisor has lots of reviews. A good place to start when looking to plan a trip. I use
Trip Advisor for all kinds of information.
- WikiTravel
-
Like its cousin Wikipedia,
WikiTravel has tons of information. Highly
recommended, lots of useful information, e.g. a nice article on
European discount airlines.
- Rick Steves
- Rick's books are well written and comprehensive. Excellent attention to detail.
- Luxe City Guide
- Nice comprehensive city guides.
- Nile Guide
- Nice comprehensive city guides.
- Virtual Tourist
- Nice comprehensive city guides.
- Flight 001 Travel Store
- Sells all kinds of travel related gear
- Elliott.org
- Christopher Elliott's very informative blog.
- Frugal Traveler Blog
- Great travel blog.