5 Best Travel Sites

Strictly for booking plane trips entirely outside of the U.S. such as a flight between Paris and Rome.

The site runs simultaneous searches of multiple airports serving the same city five airports in London, for instance and it retrieves fares from no-frills independent carriers like EasyJet and Ryanair, which many better-known travel sites overlook. That said, be warned that Dohop doesn't work nearly as well for booking airfares leaving the U.S.

The all-time best site for finding the cheapest plane tickets in the U.S.

Our biggest beef with Kayak's competitors is that when you click to book a fare, they typically direct you to a new page. Sometimes it's only then that you find out your actual departure time or worse, you're forced to plug in your dates and departure cities all over again, only to discover far different results. Kayak stands apart. Once you've found a good flight on Kayak, click on the price and you'll be sent directly to the airline's website, where the exact price for the exact flight you selected unfailingly appears. Another perk: If you are flexible on your travel dates, we recommend you try Kayak's flexible-date search tool, which covers the broadest scope of routes and airports of any site we've tested.

The granddaddy discounter helps hotels, car-rental agencies, and airlines unload all sorts of inventory at well below published prices.

Harnessing the power of the masses, the user-hotel-review site TripAdvisor is the top way to hunt for hotels.

Spotlights independently owned properties overseas, many of which never show up on American travel sites.

Any booking site can point you to large, widely known hotels. But you might prefer to stay in a charming inn or a small property on your next trip, especially if you're traveling to Europe. Well, Venere is the go-to source for this type of mom-and-pop lodging, which usually provides better value for the money than hotel chains. A recent search on Venere for hotels in Nice, France, for example, turned up 20 spots charging nightly rates of less than 60 euros ($82). That's well below the typical rates for large hotels in the resort town. Venere also offers other kinds of alternative lodging, such as apartments, pensions, and farmhouses.