It seems that the days of brick and mortar travel agents may be over. Planning trips online is the way to go especially with Online Travel Agents (OTAs) like www.orbitz.com, www.travelocity.com, and www.expedia.com offering flights, hotels, and rental car services to deal searching travelers. The beauty of these sites is that they are fare aggregators. That means that they bring deals from many airlines to one site for users to browse. My favorite Online Travel Agent is www.kayak.com. This site not only searches fares from plenty of different airlines, but it also searches amongst the 3 previously mentioned fare aggregators. I recently found some tickets from Los Angeles to London for under $500 after all charges and taxes.

If you are going to be traveling in Europe, try www.ryanair.com or www.easyjet.com. Unfortunately, most of the Online Travel Agents don’t include Ryan Air and Easy Jet’s fares, but these two budget airlines can offer flights which cost less than both bus and rail options.

Picking an airline based on price is one way to go, but for those who can’t stand bad airline food for 10 hours straight, www.airlinemeals.net may be a good site to visit. This website has plenty of info about the dining options for different airlines. There are pictures and Zagat-like reviews across the various seating classes and flight options. Check out the pictures below of my dining experience on a British Airways flight.

Breakfast 

Dinner 1st Course

Dinner 2nd Course

Another cool site which provides information which comes in handy when picking your airline is www.seatguru.com (formerly seatscorecard.com). This website will give you the lowdown on most of the major airlines’ accommodations. It has seat measurements, in-flight entertainment options, and detailed seat maps which are color coded to show the best and worst seats within each class. Nowadays, many airlines let people pick their exact seat on the plane (when purchased online) so you better know which seats are the best. If it weren’t for Seat Guru, I wouldn’t have known that the seats right in front of the middle coach bathroom are not the place to be. No one deserves that seat…especially on a bumpy flight.

Another great online resource for planning a trip are sites like www.virtualtourist.com or www.tripadvisor.com. These sites try and help people plan the best ways to spend their vacation after they get off of the plane. You can find suggestions for hotels, dining, activities, nightlife, customs, and even tourist traps for almost every destination all over the world. All of the information on these sites is contributed by fellow tourists and locals so it is pretty trustworthy. There are usually some really cool things to do in Virtual Tourist’s “Off the Beaten Path” section.

Tags: Travel ·