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5 Things to Consider Before Going on Holiday
Jun 2nd
How well you plan your holiday can have a detrimental effect on how much you enjoy your holiday. Consider the 5 following things when planning a holiday and you can be sure of a hassle free and economical trip. Whether you are staying in your home country or travelling half way across the world these 5 tips will help you have a great holiday, including the journey there and back.
Planning your holiday well in advance will prevent any last minute hiccups, I normally plan my holidays around three months in advance to be sure everything is in place well before I am due to go. The last thing you need is having to rush around at the last minute due to some unforeseen circumstances.
Consider the best time to go to your chosen destination. If you are short on budget and you are planning a holiday to somewhere that is warm in winter then you can be sure to save a good chunk of cash by booking your holiday in the off-season. Avoid the school holidays, this is when the room rates and travel rates will be at their highest.
Finding the cheapest flights can be easy if you know where to look and if you book well in advance. Not only will booking your flights in advance leave you stress free and you won’t have to run around at the last minute but you will also find the best deals.
*Bonus Tip* – Use a comparison site on the internet to find the best rates, guaranteed!
When you are packing for your holiday make sure you find out in advance what the maximum weight is for the airport you are travelling from. Never take more than you need, travelling light is always the best way to go. And remember to check and double check your hand luggage, making sure you have everything you will need on the flight to hand such as medication for illness, reading glasses and your mobile phone.
Choosing the right hotel can be difficult, especially if you are heading to some where which has a tourist economy. Top tourist destinations have a huge choice of hotels and the last thing you want to do it book into one which is uncomfortable and you spend every night wishing you had chosen another. The best thing to do is to look up the hotel you are interested in using Google and add the word “review” after it. The most common review sites such as Expedia and Laterooms have hundreds of thousands of reviews for almost every hotel in existence
I hope these 5 tips go some way to ensuring you have a relaxing and trouble free holiday, be sure to check out my other articles for more great hotel, travel and holiday tips.
Save Money on Airfare With Bing Travel’s Farecast Technology
May 29th
If there is a better way to save money on airfare than with the Farecast Technology feature of Bing Travel, then I would love to know about it. No longer are you “flying blind” when it comes to trying to determine the best time to buy an airplane ticket with eye towards saving money.
We know that airlines have to tweak prices as flight dates approach, in an effort to minimize the amount of empty seats for each and every flight. But how can a cost-conscious consumer translate this dilemma for the airline into travel savings for himself? Before the Internet the only indication one had as to how full a flight might be was having a travel agent telling you in very general terms how full a flight was when you were making your reservations. It would have been foolhardy to postpone your ticket purchase because you anticipated a price drop based on this very rough information. You might have found yourself without tickets, and regardless, there could never be a guarantee of a fare reduction.
There are no guarantees with the Farecast portion of Bing Travel either, but now at least you have a way to quantify the likelihood of ticket price changes, up and down, between now and flight time, based on years of flight pricing data– we are talking millions of data points–on US domestic flights and many international flights as well.
For given route and date, the Farecast functionality will recommend that you either purchase your ticket immediately because of the likelihood of a price increase between now and flight time, or wait to buy because fares for the route are likely to drop. The assessment is described as an actual percentage likelihood of a price rise or reduction, and also a prediction as to the amount by which the fair will increase or decrease. The amounts you stand to save are not trivial either. I have seen predictions of 30% or more in savings to be had, simply by waiting a week or two. Price predictions are augmented by a graph of price fluctuations over the last 50 days. Even if you decide to purchase immediately, you will do so with confidence that you have made an informed decision.
If this Farecast feature of Bing Travel is not a game changer, it at least enhances the decision-making power of the consumer. Even if the savings are incremental, saving even $20 or $30 by doing a search that is no more complex than one does on Expedia or one of the other large online ticketing sites, makes Bing Travel a way to save money on airfare effortlessly.
New Travel Sites For Those Coveted Tips on How to Get There and What to Do
May 26th
To me, there’s something special about searching to discover bits of secret travel and sightseeing tips about exotic places from all over the Internet and then anticipating a great vacation that will benefit from all of them. When I research the area of the world I plan on traveling to, I’ll frequently find little hidden treasures, secret restaurants, ignored little tourist gems and little-advertised local events that no one else knows about, and of course, I’ll find some of the best fares to everywhere. I’ve come by quite a few useful travel resources over my years trotting the globe; some of them are new, and some of them have seen many travel seasons. Information being power and all, here is my list of the best travel sites that I’ve ever had the pleasure of using.
Let’s start with the places that will give you an edge in the race for the cheapest air tickets. Everyone knows about the mass-market ones like Kayak, Expedia, and Bing Travel (Microsoft’s relaunched travel service that’s supposed to so creative, they call themselves a travel decision engine (as opposed to a travel search engine). But how about some of the new upstarts (or should I say startups?) that have come up over the past year or two – the ones that claim all manner of innovative discount searches? There are just so many of them – Dohop, SideStep, Mobissimo and Vayama are some of the more interesting new names in this business.
In my opinion, these travel sites deserve at least one visit at least for the kind of psychedelic names they’ve managed to come up with. On a recent trip that I made from New York to London, I decided to try all of these. Still, for me, the travel giant Bing and the upstart Dohop both did better than any of the other ones. On these two sites I could hit Buy on a round trip to London at $771; not every one of the others though, if I had hits Buy, I would have taken a hit for an extra $100. There is another booking site called cFares that’s picqued my fancy recently. The first and the most intriguing part to this travel site is the fact that they try to keep the rif-raff out by making you pony up the cash for a $50-a-year membership before they let you do anything on it. When I tried looking for the same flight on cFares, it saved me a further $70 on the fare. So the moral of the story is, travel sites for low fares, as great as they are, are not perfect. They don’t all win all of the time. The best I know how to snag cheap flights now is to take the advice of Dohop and cFares, and always pick Thursdays and Wednesdays to fly – lots of fares are predictably cheaper these two days of the week.
So these travel sites can help you buy a ticket, and book a hotel room; and everyone knows about SeatExpert and SeatGuru as the people to go for the best seat on the flight you’re taking; but is there such a thing for hotels though? That should be much more useful – you spend a lot more time in the hotel. As it happens, there is.It is called TripKick and it’s a really neat idea; it has an alarming amount of information on which particular rooms in a hotel of your choice have a bigger bathroom, a better view, and so on. For my London trip, told me to take room number 218 at a hotel on Oxford Circus, for a great view out on a park. The only problem with TripKick though, is that it only covers expensive hotels, and not the budget ones.
But enough of the mundane in travel sites; how about ideas and how to enjoy your destination once you get there? For anyone traveling to Japan, I found AitaiJapan, a great well-informed tip surce for the entertaining in the obscure. It is a great site that aims to bring a touch of local flavor to your travels; anytime you visit Japan, you could get in touch with this site to find a local volunteer who will be happy to walk around town with you and show you around. It’s so much better than being part of a travel group – with a tour guide who gives you the same old spiel everyday. It’s a wonderful feeling to just show up in Japan and find a new friend waiting for you – and every volunteer speaks English too. The best part is, they refuse to accept anything for the service.
For some wonderful from-the-heart recommendations for places to go to anywhere in the world, you’ll need to try out AtlasObscura. As the name suggests, the site tries to give you ideas for places to go to that are exotic, wonderful, and just off the wall. The great thing is, it covers the whole world; and if you are traveling, it wouldn’t matter where, this is the website you need to look up – if it is the only one you ever did.
Finding Low Airfares Just Became a Little Tougher
May 23rd
Going to an online travel website for low airfares is no longer the best way to get low fares. The airlines are at war with the travel websites over what they need to pay them to have their fares listed. The travel websites want more than the airlines are willing to pay. Where does that leave us? American Airlines seems to be the airline that is the deepest in it, at war with everyone all around. They denied Orbitz the right to list their fares in December; and then Delta did the same with OneTravel and Globester. Expedia got so mad with American, that they voluntarily dropped their flights from their website. Even Sabre, the computer system that allows all the travel agents to check up on fares and routes is kicking American off its system. So anyone looking for low airfares is going to have to look in more places – if two of the largest airlines aren’t going to be on the travel websites anymore. Unfortunately, it doesn’t end there.
You can’t find in the lowest VirginAmerica or JetBlue fares on the travel websites anymore either. You can only find them on the airlines’ own websites. And of course, airlines like Allegiant and the Southwest have long asked their customers to come to their own websites if they want to fly with them. What on earth are you supposed to do if you wish to quickly go buy a reasonably low-priced ticket online now? Do you really have to waste your time checking on several airline websites? There are ways however to get to where you want to go with only a couple of websites.
ITA Software is a website that all the travel websites go to for their listings. Luckily, they run a travel website of their own. Searching on ITASoftware’s own website will let you search on all the airlines. They won’t let you buy a ticket on their website though. Once you find out what airline it is that has the fare you want, you just have to hop over to the website of that airline to buy your ticket. You can also go to a website that helps you with a meta-search – like Kayak or Fly. They won’t sell you a plane ticket either. But they let you search all over the place. Since they don’t sell you tickets, airlines like American and Delta have no problem listing their fares on them.
For a search that will allow you to compare even fares on Southwest, try logging on to AirfareWatchdog. They have actual people looking up fares for you.
Bing’s travel website has a great tool to help you find low airfares. They have something called a Price Predictor algorithm that tries to tell you if a given fare might rise or fall over the coming week. In short, there is no one place you can go to for fares anymore. Finding low airfares for a trip just became a little harder.
Nine Secrets to Save on Air Travel
May 20th
When planning a trip, one of the biggest expenses is planning for your flight travel. Airline tickets, especially for international flights, can be quite costly; however, there are ways to get more value for your travel dollars. Here are a few tips:
1. Use Kayak.com to look for cheap flights from hundreds of travel sites on the web. Don’t forget to also check discount airlines like Southwest.com, Airtran.com, and USA3000.com which don’t advertise on Kayak, which often have lower fares when traveling within the United States.
2. Using Bing.com/travel (formerly Farecast.com) can help you decide when to travel by letting you know when fares will go up or down, based on its “price predictor” which takes into account historical data. If you give the site your itinerary, it will tell you to either purchase your tickets or wait for an anticipated drop in prices.
3. Make use of each airlines’ loyalty programs (which are free to join) and they will send you information on special deals via email.
4. Join Airfarewatchdog.com and input the city you typically fly from, and the site will find you the best deals on flights from that city, as well as any close alternative airports you might consider flying from.
5. Take the flight less traveled: flying midweek (AKA Tuesday or Wednesday) and also on Saturday afternoon, in between the crushes of travelers on Friday and Sunday, can offer the lowest rates.
6. Pick your destination based on cheap flights. If a Florida beach vacation is in mind, but no particular area, use Kayak’s Buzz to see which city is cheapest and fly into that airport. (Many times Orlando is significantly cheaper than flights to Florida’s east or west coast, but within an hour and a half drive to either.)
7. Check out flying fees, and avoid them. You can avoid charges for buying your tickets by phone or at the counter by booking with the airline you’re flying, or with Expedia, Orbitz, or Travelocity- which don’t add any booking fees. Baggage fees have increased substantially over the last year or two, so pack lightly when traveling, and compare airline baggage fees at FlyingFees.com.
8. Consider booking through a connector city to save money. London is a great connector city to most of Europe; as it is inexpensive o fly there from New York City. Booking to London and then using the smaller discount European airlines to reach your final destination can save you a lot of money, even if you need to overnight in London.
9. Pack snacks and drinks into your carry-ons. While you are not allowed to carry liquids past security, you can bring an empty water bottle and fill it after you get through security. Add powdered drink mixes for great, inexpensive drinks, no matter how many layovers you have. You can also bring snack foods, crackers, and fruit in your carry-ons to consume on the plane.
After booking your flights, the cost of accommodations is the most expensive part of a vacation. Use a site with which you can compare hotels and rates in all of the areas you are interested in.