It is as if the Internet was made for travel research; so central to the very concept of travel has the Internet become. And it's only become more so with the pressures of the recession squeezing the travel industry mercilessly, trying to produce the best deals possible in today's low liquidity customer scene. Travel information is a lucrative dot com business to be in, and you'd see this by the abundance of travel assistance services on the Internet offering deals on airfares, hotel rooms, car rentals, vacation packages and travel advice in general. Let's look at a selection of travel websites that offer the best services.
Flight reservations - Insidetrip.com is one of the most innovative travel websites around. They give you great information on the flight deals there are to be had; only, they don't rank deals in anything like the way other regular airline reservation websites do. When you try to search for flight deals on a particular route, they tell you everything about the flights they list - how much luggage you get to carry, what kind of food service you have, how punctual airline is, how far you walk to the boarding gate and so on. Airfare Watchdog is another useful service. It is for people who don't really mind when they travel, just as long as they get to travel at a very competitive price. The website hires a bunch of people to keep scanning all the airline websites to look for information on their sale deals. Their staff also hold rewards memberships on all the airlines to be able to get promotional codes and offers to tell their users about. And they list every small airline in the country, even low cost airlines like JetBlue.
Hotels - TripAdvisor is the gold standard in user generated hotel reviews around the world. They have tens of millions of reviews from customers at hotels, and they have many professional reviewers too. Hotels complain bitterly about how every one of their slipups appears on the website for all to see; and travelers take a great joy in posting the worst complaints they have about their experiences at various hotels. Hotels.com lists more than 50,000 hotel properties around the world. They have great bargains for last-minute bookings, and in general, the prices they list are very conservative. Or how about HomeExchange.com, thesite that has thousands of listings for people who are willing to open their homes to you when you travel in their country; all in return for having you opening up your home to travelers just like yourself.
Car Rentals - Among travel websites that deal in car rentals, Hotwire.com is a great concept - they collect data from several car rental firms they partner with, Enterprise and Budget among them, and sift through them to publish the best deals on offer at any given time. Hotwire also offers something called a blind booking special. This is a little tactic that helps them sidestep customer resistance in the face of the unfamiliar. They publish a hot deal with information of what you need to pay, and what you get; you just don't see what company provides the deal. There's nothing wrong with this; a Camry is a Camry, no matter what car rental company you get it from. And for international car rental bargains, try AutoEurope.com. They'll help you make competitive rentals across dozens of countries around the world; and if you have a problem at your destination with the rented car, AutoEurope acts as your go-between in dealing with the rental company in that country.
Vacation Packages - A vacation package as a big-ticket item; not just because it ends up costing a lot, but also because luxury vacations are just so deeply important to people. Try CruiseComplete.com, for help navigating the offers you have your pick of from hundreds of travel agents around the country. And Expedia still offers some of the best airfare- hotel- car packages around.
TripAdvisor, as long as it's been around, has had no real competition in the travel advice market so far. But that apart, try WebFlyer.com and Points.com to find out about the ways use your frequent flyer miles over different programs; and to avoid flight delays, try Delays.com; it does exactly what its name suggests - it gives you e-mail and text message alerts about flight delays; try TravelGuard.com for travel insurance information too.
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