Cooke’s Tour: 5 Top travel sites
Jay Cooke is an editor for the guidebook publisher Lonely Planet and a former editor for the travel magazine Via. Here are five of his favorite Web sites for planning and saving money on travel. You can find more of his travel tips at outwester.com.
“Airfarewatchdog sniffs out the best fares du jour,” says Cooke. Enter a departure airport, and Airfarewatchdog will return a list of all the current specials. “They dig very deeply into the sites that are out there to pull out the real unique bargains, and they check with the airlines that aren’t affiliated with Orbitz or Expedia, like Southwest and JetBlue.”
If you want to bid on a hotel room, Cooke says that you should start here. “When you bid on airfare, you don’t have much control over routing, and you can be dissatisfied,” he explains. “With hotels, there are fewer variables. BiddingForTravel.com allows people to post recent successful bids on properties by location. It also has a really good FAQ to help you figure out the art of bidding.”
“People who love to travel often love travelers, and they want to interact with people from all around the world,” says Cooke, explaining the appeal of CouchSurfing .com, a global network of independent travelers who agree to let one another stay in their homes gratis . “Free is my favorite price. You might have to wash your new pal’s dishes, though.”
“Smarter Travel is a good place to go for steady, consistent deals,” says Cooke. “It has a booking-engine comparison site where you input your departure and arrival cities and dates, and it will then search the big search engines, as well as places like Kayak.com and UltimateFares. You need to look at as many travel sites as possible, because they all are just brokers; even if one sells out of a cheap fare, the other might still have it.”
VRBO
“Skip the hotels and become a temporary resident,” says Cooke. VRBO (Vacation Rentals by Owner) lists more than 75,000 homes worldwide, and makes a great option for families. “With VRBO, you get to live like a local around the world. I swear by it. I stayed for a week in an efficiency apartment in Paris when my wife was pregnant. We were able to save 25 euros a day by cooking our own breakfasts.”— Mathew Honan
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