Top Travel Sites

During my travels, I’ve come across a variety of travel sites that are both good and bad. In this section are some reviews of the best travel sites I know of - obviously based entirely on my opinion! If you’re after specific destination reviews, go to my holidays page instead, while if you want hotel reviews, pick a place from the list to the right.

I’m not a great fan of sites that simply regurgitate the same old stuff and make life difficult to navigate, nor do I tend to use sites I don’t know or feel a bit fly-by-night, so generally they are all well respected and established travel sites. Most of the sites here offer holidays, although one or two are specialists in flight and/or hotel bookings. The majority of sites here allow you to book a complete holiday package as well as separate flights or hotels.

Sidestep is a USA based site and primarily I use it for finding flights rather than for my package holiday needs, but it deals with flights from any destination to any destination so even if you live outside the US it’s ideal. Where Sidestep grabs me is the way it displays the information in a really easy-to-use format with a “sidebar” containing filters that allow you to fine-tune the search once you’ve done it.

There are two other really useful facets of Sidestep. Firstly, and this is one of my major gripes with many sites, it remembers your holiday dates and the search criteria you put in, even if you go away and come back a few days later. The other service I use is their email alert messaging system. For example …

Read the rest of this post »

If you haven’t come across Trip Advisor yet and you go on holiday every now and again, then honestly…where have you been? Trip Advisor is the web’s leading travel reviews site where regular people like me and you can go to leave reviews on hotels anywhere in the world. Not just hotels in fact…they also do attractions which I found very useful recently for a day trip to London - I’d never have thought of the Houses Of Parliament tour but it’s ranked Top #10 on Trip Advisor so we did. And it was. A great find.

Primarily though, Trip Advisor is known for hotel reviews. Pretty much every …

Read the rest of this post »