The Best Travel Sites

Looking to plan and book a bargain getaway? Traveling in a rush for an emergency? The best travel websites will help get you where you're going at a price you can afford.

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Some days, when I remember life before the Internet, email, and smartphones, I cannot even comprehend how I traveled. Long (long) gone are the days of keeping an atlas under the passenger seat of the car, or rolling down the highway scanning motel sign after motel sign for "Vacancy." And travel agents? Forget about it. Travel websites have revolutionized how we plan, book, and even pay for travel.

Online travel services make it easy to research those big-ticket items, such as flights and hotels, but also the nitty gritty, such as the best seat on a particular airplane, or the best place to grab breakfast in Chicago O'Hare (the answer is Tortas Fronteras, in terminals 1, 3, and 5).

Most frequent travelers have a favorite travel website, but why stick to just one? There's no harm in getting to know the many sites that are available and what each of them does best.

You know the usual suspects: Orbitz, Kayak, Expedia, TripAdvisor. While they offer nearly identical core services, they are actually different. The question is: "How?" Which is the best for hotel-airfare combo deals? Which has the easiest tools for booking multi-city flights? And do any give you flexibility in searching for low fares?

That said, for air-travel prices, you really can't go wrong with any of the major online search sites. Try entering the same parameters across multiple travel-reservation sites, and you'll see that the lowest fares almost always come up within a few dollars of the other results.

The best travel websites that we've reviewed at PCMag are listed below. Click through to read the full reviews, and definitely let us know if you agree or disagree in the comments. Did we miss a site you love? Let us know that, too. We hope that our list helps you a few that will whisk you off to some exotic location soon.

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