As you read this post, I will be on my first stop of a 3 week long roadtrip through New England (North East of the USA) and Canada. Usually, I don’t plan too much, but I do like to know my options before boarding the plane. The Lonely Planet and Rough Guides are my preferred paper helpers. But this year, I’ve really found the Internet to be an valuable resource.
Here’s a list of sites I couldn’t have done without:
- Yahoo! Trip Planner: There are a few trip planners on the web, but Yahoo!’s is the most complete. It has an incredible amount of hotels, attractions, destinations and comments available. It tends to be a bit slow from time-to-time and the interface can be a bit confusing, but once you’re used to it, it’s pretty ok.
- VirtualTourist.com is one of the largest user community sites entirely dedicated to tourist tips. The best hotels, the worst tourist traps, you’ll find them all on Virtual Tourist. Together with the Yahoo! Trip Planner, and a few guides, Virtual Tourists gave me all information to plot out a route. Most of the other sites, I’ve used to find affordable hotels and transportation.
- To fill in the blanks, I’ve used Google a lot. I know this sounds like a stupid suggestion, but through Google I’ve found a few great sites. Such as the VisitPA one. I really love it, and because of that one, we’ll be staying a few days in Pennsylvania.
- ebookers is a European travel site, so I’m sorry to all my American readers. But I’m mentioning this site first, because it seemed to have the best rates.
- Hotels.com is a similar, but a worldwide site. I think it offers the widest range of options and I plan to use this on the road to book last-minute hotel rooms for cheap.
- Booking.com rounds off the trio of hotel search sites. Although they do have overlapping offers, they also all seem to differ just a little. But 10% price difference can really impact your budget (more money for drinks and amusement parks)
- If you want cheap plan tickets, Supersaver is the place to be. No other site could even come close to the prices they have.
- Well, ok, if you’re not in the countries supported by Supersaver, the very popular Expedia does have many good flight offers.
- TripAdvisor is more of a allround site. It does offer flight and hotel search, but there’s much more. You can search for things to do and read many many reviews. It’s nice if you find a hotel or venue on one of the sites above and want a second opinion.
- If you can’t find an affordable hotel, you can always turn to hostels.com. Hotels in major cities tend to be extremely expensive, so if you can do without the luxury, a hostel is a nice second choice.
In spite of all this planning, We’re also leaving a lot open for exploration and we’ll fill in the gaps as we see fit. But it’s always nice to know the options.
What do you think, are any important sites missing?