Travel

#10 Interesting and Helpful Travel Websites

September 15, 2014 / By NomadicMatt

Every day, a dozen new travel websites start up in hopes of making your trip planning easier, help you meet locals, crowdsource your advice, or save money. And with equal speed as many travel websites fail each day. A lot of travel start ups try to fill a void where none exists. There are just some things that people don’t want, need, or desire. There many are with innovative ideas but are poorly executed and end up floundering.

Then there are the ones that stick around, grow, and catch on because they are truly useful and not some fad. I want to share ten websites that can (or have the potential to) help make your planning easier and help you save money:

Busbud

TripExpert

Tripping

So, I love apartment rentals. They are an inexpensive alternative to hotels and the next step up from hostels. The problem? There seems to be about 10 million rental websites out there. It s hard to search them all. The solution? Tripping. This website searches about 18 apartment rental sites, including HomeAway, VRBO, FlipKey, Housetrip, Interhome, Roomorama, and Booking.com. It is a huge, huge time saver. I highly recommend it. The only downside? It doesn’t search Airbnb. You have to do that on your own.

Speaking of Airbnb, get $25 off your first stay with my link. Save some money!

Fly Shortcut

There’s a airline ticket booking trick called “hidden city ticketing.” Basically, if your flight from LA to NYC is $300 but a flight from LA to NYC to Boston is $280, you book the second flight, get off at NYC, and never get the last flight. (This only works if you have a carry on and are going one way.) Of course, airlines don’t like passengers doing this and have specific language in their terms and conditions against this. You won t go to jail but, if caught, it can result in your frequent flier account being terminated.

But it is hard to find these hidden routes and this is where this website comes in. They find the routes for you. This website (and method) have been around for a while but doing it, and doing it often, will get you on an airlines radar really quickly! That s not a place you want to be.