My favorite travel planning websites
I’ve been booking most of my travel online for a good 10 years now. Lots of wonderful innovations have come out in that time, but for the past several years my approach has remained mostly the same: a few reliable go-to websites that get me what I want in a relatively efficient manner. They keep me from losing my mind when I feel myself being pulled into travel-planning-related information overload.
With the launch of several new travel sites this year, it looks like my standard approach might be about to change. While I’m excited to move on to the new and the better, I’m also pretty pleased with my current travel-planning routine. So before I review the new sites, I thought I’d write about my standard plan of attack up until now.
Kayak is usually my first stop when planning a new trip. There are a few other sites out there that consolidate flight offers, but in my experience Kayak is consistently the best. Sometimes I’ll swing by Google Maps to see if driving wouldn’t be a better option, and every once in a while I’ll look up trains, too.
For hotels, it’s usually a session of cross-referencing between TripAdvisor for reviews and Booking.com (and sometimes HRS or Venere) for availability and price. TripAdvisor tends to have pretty good hotel reviews for most destinations in Europe. I particularly like Booking.com for its easy and clear cancellation policies, as well as the prices which are usually the best out there. When I am beginning to plan a trip I’ll often make a placeholder reservation at a place that sounds good at first glance, knowing that I have the option of going back and changing it if further research produces an even better sleep. I also usually do some extra searching for apartment rentals, but the sites I use for that vary depending on the destination. TripAdvisor sometimes lists apartments, too.
When it comes to restaurants for a new destination, my research usually gets a little more fragmented. Frommer’s is often a good place to start. I usually skip TripAdvisor at this point – as much as I love them for hotels, I find their restaurant listings tend to lack the critical mass of information required to be truly useful. Zagat used to be a staple of mine in the US, but their European listings are pretty awful.
As I make reservations and bookings, all confirmation emails get forwarded to TripIt, which organizes them into a nice neat itinerary for me. TripIt also makes information sharing easy when there are multiple travelers involved.
I supplement this routine with tips from friends, blogs, and other sites (not to mention the odd old-fashioned guide book), depending on how much time and energy I want to put into my research. I’ll usually run searches for lists of museums and current exhibitions in my destination city, as well as for self-guided walking tours I can use to get my bearings in a new place. And it always helps to post a status update on Facebook asking for tips. My friends are one well-traveled bunch.
What about you? What steps are essential for your travel planning?
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