Avoid Travel Booking Mistakes

This article is not about who you should choose to book hotel or airline reservations it’s about sites that you may not have heard of to help you make good travel decisions.

Hotel Reservations, Booking, and Reviews

Recommended

TripAdvisor – I’d bet most of you already know about TripAdvisor; it’s very hard to search for any online Travel and not come across them. As mentioned they are owned by the same company that owns Hotels.com and Expedia so you would expect that when you check rates at TripAdvisor these companies would be prominently displayed. Again most online websites are owned by only 4 Companies! They are just “Brands”. I’ve researched this extensively. And even among those 4 companies one has to wonder how many “deals” exist.

I’m not recommending TripAdvisor as a way to book online cheaply, who knows maybe they are maybe they are not. They are just middlemen “Brokers”. But I am recommending TripAdvisor as the best way to compare the quality and service of Hotels because they reviews are written by real people who “tell it like it is”. Before I take any trip I check TripAdvisor to get the lowdown on what people are experiencing in the Hotels I am considering.

BiddingforTravel.Yuku.com – In my opinion this is an Ugly looking site, but if you are looking for the cheapest possible rates and you use Priceline.com you’ll want to check out this site to see the prices of bids that are being accepted by the Hotels. I find this interesting because here in Las Vegasthe prices are all over the place right now.

Air Travel Help

SeatGuru – I love this site. I was looking for a Flight to the Los Angeles area. Because it’s a short hop and doesn’t take much time from where I live I was interested in getting the best most comfortable seat for my money. Now I know that Southwest Airlines is all Coach Seating and first come first served, but I still wanted to know where the “Best” seats were on the plane. I also wanted to compare these seats to those available on JetBlue.

I have flown on many Boeing 737’s which Southwest employs, but I have never been on an Airbus (French) or Embraer (Brazil) manufactured Jet. I have not been terribly impressed with the recent Airbus Track Record, but I always feel save on Boeing for some reason.

Anyway to cut to the charse, SeatGuru allows you to look at the configuration of each seat on each manufacturers Jet Aircraft. So you search your flights on your favorite booking engine, then you go to SeatGuru to check out the plane and try and pick the best seats! Really cool! SeatGuru is part of TripAdvisor… which … oh man is also owned by the same folks that own Expedia, Hotels.com, Hotwire.com… and a dozen more. You get the idea; Travel is big business! You should not be surprised to learn that most websites are just “Brands” for large corporate enterprises. In any case SeatGuru is very cool!

WebFlyer – Do you travel a lot and accumulate “Frequent Flier” miles? Then WebFlyer is exactly the kind of site that will interest you. This is the place to learn how to leverage your frequent flier miles and rewards programs.