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When it comes to making travel arrangements, there’s no lack of online options. To help you sort through the best ones, I’m sharing my favorite sites for booking accommodations, rental cars, flights, tours, and more.
These are the ones I use when I’m planning my trips. So you can be confident you’re getting great prices from standup companies.
Accommodations
When we travel as a family, we typically choose a vacation rental home so we have a living room for hanging out and separate bedrooms (#teens). But if it’s just my husband and me, we go the hotel route. Below are the websites we use to book our accommodations.
- Agoda.com: It’s a weird name, but this site is 100% legit and I book all my hotel rooms through it now. Even though Agoda is owned by the same company that owns Booking, Kayak, and Priceline, it always has the lowest rates compared to them or Expedia. It offers a full selection of hotels and an easy-to-use dashboard for keeping track of your bookings. In the past, I’ve used this site to book rooms in Japan, Iceland, Chicago, and many more U.S. destinations. Just be sure to go to their “Coupons & Deals” page first and claim all the coupons so you get and see the discount reflected in the nightly rates.
- VRBO.com: AirBNB is the big player in the vacation home rental space, but VRBO has a huge stock of vacation homes as well and it’s pretty easy to find something on the lower end of a price range. The company is owned by Expedia, so you know it’s legit. I’ve booked rentals in the Great Smoky Mountains, Nashville, and more using this site.
Rental Cars
My husband is the one who books our car rentals since he’s also the driver and he’s 6 feet 5 inches tall and needs a lot of legroom. As you can imagine, big cars don’t come cheap but we’ve found competitive deals.
- Expedia.com: It’s a pain to go directly to car rental company sites to look up prices of rental cars and then try to compare them to other companies. It’s faster, easier, and sometimes cheaper to use Expedia instead to book a rental car. We’ve also heard that Costco has good car rental deals, but we haven’t personally used them.
Flights
Paying for flights can really eat into your travel budget, especially when you’re flying as a family. That’s why I’m always hunting for a good deal on flights (non-stop, ideally!).
- WayAway: This flight search engine lets you quickly compare flight prices and routes. WayAway labels the search results to tell you which flights are the fastest, cheapest, cheapest with a convenient layover, and more. It also has a price chart so you can compare prices to fly on other dates. You can personalize your search with lots of handy filters, like telling it to show you only those flights that include baggage or to eliminate low-cost carriers or that you only want to see nonstop flights.
Tours & Activities
It’s great to explore the city on your own, but you won’t get the same history and feel for a place as you do when you do a guided experience. There are so many different types of tours and activities to do, from segway tours to kayaking to cooking classes and more! I recommend choosing at least one guided tour or activity to do on each trip. That way you can relax while someone else takes the lead and gives you the inside scoop on your destination.
- Viator: Search for experiences for your trip on Viator, the largest online seller of tours and activities. You reserve your activities and pay later and most of the experiences offer free cancellation up to 24 hours before the scheduled time. The first time I used Viator I booked a tour of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. We met our guide at a nearby hotel, boarded a bus, and then went to the Imperial Palace where the guide gave us a tour. It was relaxing not having to navigate everything ourselves and we had a great experience because the guide gave us the juicy backstory on the art and architecture.
- Get Your Guide: This is Viator’s competitor, so it’s good to check out their offerings as well. Many of the tours and activities will be the same. But occasionally you’ll find a unique experience listed on Get Your Guide.
Travel Deals
Who doesn’t like to save money? Here are two smart ways to get the most bang for your buck when booking a trip:
- Travelzoo: If you want to know about some of the best travel deals, sign up for Travelzoo’s newsletter. I love reading it every week. (Even if I don’t purchase anything, it gives me ideas for future vacations and what they would cost.) The newsletter includes deals on guided trips, trip packages, cruises, and hotels.
- Rakuten: I just signed up with Rakuten to earn cash back on my purchases and received my first payment of $20. Here’s how it works: Sign up, install the browser extension (they prompt you to do this once you sign up), and shop. If you’re on a website that Rakuten works with, it’ll alert you with a pop-up. Click on that to say yes, you want cash back on purchases made on the website. For instance, if I go to the Expedia site right now to book a rental car, Rakuten tells me that I get up to 13% cash back! The percentage varies from company to company, but I love getting money back on stuff I would purchase anyway. Try this super easy way to save money on all your online travel purchases (and all purchases in general, from Target to Nordstrom to Ulta and more).
Want to save more money on travel? Grab my free guide below where I give you ideas on how you can easily cut travel expenses and still have an incredible vacation: