Travel

There are a variety of features that make a travel website a good or best cheap travel site. No one cheap online travel agency has all the features you need to make an informed decision, so you'll probably want to use a combination to find the best price.

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Trip Advisors Destination Guide is a helpful resource and Smartertravel.com details the best time of year to fly to wherever.

When looking for the lowest prices, you've got to be ready to travel on days people don't normally fly. Historically, Fridays and Sundays are the busiest days and therefore the most expensive. Try searching for flights mid-week or on Saturdays. Both Hotwire.com and Kayak let you scope out price trends with an interactive 30-day calendar. Most people like to travel just before and after the holidays. Beat the rush, avoid the crowds, and travel on the holiday instead -- you'll save yourself some stress and a lot of green. Also, it's best to book a flight at least seven days in advance for the cheapest rates. Experts note that waiting until the last minute is risky because prices can go up and seats might disappear.

Booking hotels is a little trickier. Hotels consider several factors when setting prices that airlines can disregard, like new entrants to the market (i.e. new hotels opening up), the local business climate, and tour operator bookings. But in general, the same principles that guide your search for cheap airfare should serve as a guide for cheap hotel bookings. The Travel Insider is a good resource for understanding the ins and outs of hotel bookings.

As you search for the best price on multiple budget travel sites, you'll probably find that several offer the same price for a particular trip. Bear in mind that some travel deals sites hide or obscure taxes and fees, which causes the stated price to appear lower than what the total actually is. Expedia.com, Orbitz, and Travelocity.com put the all-inclusive price underneath the first price given.

There are a few different methods cheap travel sites use to search for the best price. The traditional, or industry standard, is to collect data from airlines and hotel companies and post the results all in one place so you can compare deals; Orbitz.com and Travelocity.com use this approach. While it's certainly possible to find bargain deals this way, it's a good idea to use other discount travel sites that employ more complex search methods. This may seem challenging to the novice traveler, but in the next few sections we'll break down the information into bite-size cheap travel expertise.

Experts across the board advise bargain hunters to use a travel deals site, like Bing.com/travel, Kayak.com, or Skyscanner.com, that employs a meta-search strategy for finding the cheapest flights, hotel rooms, and car rentals. These meta-search travel sites aggregate data from numerous travel deals sites simultaneously and filter the best deals based on your parameters. You can't book your trip directly from the meta-search results but a link takes you to the site where you can buy a ticket, reserve a room, or rent a car. Industry experts at Kiplinger. the Washington Post. and PC World agree that Kayak.com is among the most comprehensive of the meta-search travel sites; this cheap travel website claims it pores over more than 400 travel sites for each search.

A recent addition to the meta-search category is Bing.com/travel, a Microsoft product. The major difference between Bing.com/travel and Kayak.com is Bing's "price predictor" feature, which informs consumers if prices on a particular route are expected to rise or fall so you know whether to buy tickets now or wait. Bing.com/travel accomplishes this seemingly magical feat by using complicated algorithms to predict price trends. According to an independent audit sponsored by the company, the price predictor has an accuracy rate of 74.5%. The downside to Bing.com/travel, according to Kiplinger, is that it searches fewer sites than Kayak.com and sometimes transfers you to the homepage of the booking site instead of the purchasing page so you have to input your itinerary again and initiate another search.

Another kind of search is the "opaque" or "blind" method that was pioneered by Hotwire.com. Founded in 2000 by six major airlines, Hotwire.com began by offering incredibly discounted airfares by masking the identity of the airline and the time of the flight. Hotwire.com no longer hides the airline name but still employs the opaque method on hotel bookings. Priceline offers an opaque booking option for both flights and hotels using its "Name Your Own Price" feature, which unveils the identity of the supplier only after your bid is accepted.

Any good cheap travel site should have a search function that lets you search a wide variety of airlines and hotels several months in advance or even for the next day. A good discount travel site should also have a flexible booking feature that lets you search multiple dates and airports at once (New York City, for example, has three major airports -- JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark); if you only search for flights to one airport you may miss out on cheaper fares to a nearby airport. With the exception of Priceline.com, all the travel deal sites we researched afford customers flexible search options.

A related feature on many travel deals sites is package booking. Booking flights, hotels, and car rentals on the same site at the same time can save you a lot of money. You won't find package booking on meta-search engines like Bing.com/travel, but you will find it on cheap travel sites like Priceline.com and Expedia.com, both of which specialize in vacation packages.

Direct booking is when you book directly with the provider; in other words, you go to the website of a provider (airline, hotel, or rental car company), search availability and prices, and buy a ticket or make a reservation. You can trace any deal you find on the web back to its source (i.e. the provider), so if you see a deal you like, it's not a bad idea to check the website of the carrier or hotel to see if it offers the same price without the booking fees that some budget travel sites charge. Most providers have email lists you can join for updates on travel deals, which sometimes trump the deals you find on cheap travel sites; your inbox might fill up quickly but it's a small price to pay for early warning about travel bargains.

While many cheap travel websites offer similar deals, opaque booking sites like Hotwire.com and Priceline.com let frugal travelers book unpublished rates without knowing who the provider is. Opaque booking benefits all parties: you (the traveler) get a great deal -- big discounts on flights, hotels, and car rentals -- and travel providers maintain their regular customer base through traditional sales while filling up airplane seats, hotel rooms, and cars with people who wouldn't normally book their services.

Opaque booking sites function differently for hotels and flights. To book a hotel using Hotwire.com or Priceline.com, enter your destination and dates of arrival and departure and then choose an "area" and star rating for lodging. In New York City, for example, you might choose a three-star hotel in the theater district or a four-star hotel in SoHo; one traveler reports on Betterbidding.com of booking a three-star room near one of the main gates to Disney World for $29 a night. But this system is not for the faint of heart. In exchange for a discount deal on your hotel, there are no refunds, exchanges, or changes allowed. Although travel sites reviews say Hotwire.com and Priceline.com deal with reliable hotel chains, choosing the "area" for your hotel requires that you be familiar with the layout of the city, especially for international travel. Some "areas" may look conveniently located on a map but in reality may be far from central attractions. Also note that if you want a room for two adults, Hotwire.com and Priceline.com will guarantee a room that fits two adults but won't guarantee it has two beds; you're on your own to work this out with the hotel after you've booked.

Hotwire.com uses opaque booking only for hotels, but Priceline.com uses it for flights and car rentals, as well. Priceline.com augments its blind booking approach with its "Name Your Own Price" feature, which lets you state how much you're willing to pay for the service you want. Priceline.com claimed in a 2009 article in The New York Times that this feature lets you save up to 40% on airfare, 30% on car rentals, and 50% on hotels. But there are limits on how often you can bid on the service you want and you must change some aspect of the itinerary, such as the number of stars for a hotel or your travel date, if your bid isn't accepted. Expert reviewers at Budget Travel say a good starting bid is 50% of the listed price, which you can find using any cheap travel site like Expedia.com or the travel provider's website; winning bids posted on message boards at Bidontravel.com, Betterbidding.com, Gogreentravel.com, and Yelp.com also provide some price guidance. Remember, Priceline.com doesn't reveal the name of the airline or the time of your flight (the cheap travel website won't book flights before 6am or after 10pm, however), the hotel, or the car rental agency until your bid is accepted and your credit/debit card is charged. If you're okay with a little uncertainty, Priceline.com can save you a lot of money.

Recently, Travelocity.com has ventured into the opaque booking market with its "Top Secret Hotels." As with Hotwire.com, you name your dates and destination, click on an area, and up pops a list of three- and four-star hotels with very low prices. On a recent search for hotels in Orlando, FL we found four-star hotels for $45 a night, double occupancy.

A common complaint voiced by users and experts alike is that the hotel rating system used by cheap travel websites is not exactly industry standard. Indeed, most cheap travel sites set their own criteria for awarding stars to hotels, and USA Today provides a good rundown of the differences among travel website hotel ratings. Just remember when reserving a room, especially through an opaque booking site, that a three-star hotel on Travelocity.com may earn four stars on Hotwire.com, and vice versa.