My Favorite Travel Websites

ACCOMMODATION

·      Booking.com - I’ve used dozens of hotel websites.  They all allow you to compare based on price, location, stars, etc.  What they don’t do is allow you to find properties that are as inexpensive as you might need – with most only allowing you to scroll down to about $100 a night.  For long-term travel, that price doesn’t even begin to cut it… 

Booking.com has been part of my everyday since arriving in Britain.  We’ve been booking rooms same day and have so far paid no more than 36 pounds per night.  We’ve booked a Ramada at 23 pounds, a number of hostels at 25, a pretty swank hotel for 29 (although a rather fat guy passed out drunk right in front of our door at midnight and drunk snored like a banshee until we called the front desk to remove him), and a B&B for 30.  This site includes hostels as well, in case you’re into that (make sure to click the private room square – turns out sharing a 12 bunk room is a complete and total nightmare – no matter how cheap it is).

·      Wimdu, AirBNB, Roomorama – These are all self-listing sites for accommodation in cities worldwide.  I’ve used AirBNB and Wimdu and had positive experiences with both.  These companies allow the average Joe to list a private room, shared room, or an entire house on this site with pictures, a description, and an availability calendar.  The good houses seem to get booked up early, but you can always find something on one of these sites if you’d rather get away from the big chain hotels (and their ridiculous prices).

·         Workaway.info.com - Workaway is a website in which to get lost. It’s very basic in its design, and I’d never heard about it until I followed a few links into the black hole of Pinterest.  Suddenly, I’ve got the option to choose my continent, country, and desired work in exchange for accommodation and food.  Work 5 hours a day, 5 days per week and you get a place to stay and your basic food covered.  You create a user profile and then email the hosts to start a conversation about a timeline/help they may need/if you two would mutually benefit from a workaway exchange.  I got a little too excited about this website and spent a solid week emailing 35 hosts about possibly working for them.  I checked my email about every hour in anticipation of receiving responses, and started every day with a sprint towards my computer.  In the end, I received about 10 replies to my 35 emails, over half of which were no thank you due to already having folks scheduled.  The few that were interested in bringing us on had their owns ways of interviewing us – a skype interview, a lengthy questionnaire, or extended email correspondence to try to get to know us.  I realize this sounds like a fair bit of effort, but trust me, if you find the right listings/hosts/places, this can cut your costs DRAMATICALLY and I hope enhance your experience by a mile.  A few folks I’ve shown this to have told me that it’s the same thing as WWOOFING.  I would argue that it’s quite different, as it’s not open to every Tom, Dick, and Harry who wants to jet up into your part of the world.  The applicants are screened carefully, and it’s almost like an actual job interview.

Full disclosure: Our first workaway experience did not quite go as planned (see Jordan), but I’m going to chalk this up as being an outlier event.  The next ones we have scheduled (workaway for April #1, workaway #2, May) appear to be absolute winners.

TRAVEL GUIDES

·      Rough Guides - I want to be a good trip planner.  I always come in with the best intentions, but so often I get stuck on where to stay or where to eat.  I often forget about the reason I’m going to a new spot in the first place so I get there and panic because I want to find the best of everything but have no idea where to start.  In comes my white knight website, Rough Guides.  When you get to the website, you can filter based on country and scroll through the titles until you see something that interests you.  Whether it’s “Absolute Best Walks in Britain” or “The Hidden Gems in a World of UK Castle’s”, you’ll find something that sparks your imagination. 

FLIGHTS

·      Skyscanner/Fly (great fare calendar)/ Hipmunk/Kayak

USER REVIEWS

·      TripAdvisor – Trip Advisor is pretty self-explanatory.  It is the largest database of user reviews for food, hotels, car rentals, and experiences – just about anything you can think of related to travel.  Usually, the reviews are pretty spot on, but you have to be careful here because people tend to review only when they REALLY love a place – or REALLY hate it…

USEFUL TRAVEL BLOGS

·      Travelettes – This is a fun group of lady travel bloggers who have gotten together to create this site (any other southern ladies round here want to create a site like this with me?!).  It’s got some great articles on hidden gems (something I’m always looking for) as well as interesting perspectives on places you might have already been but not really gotten to know. 

·      Beers and Beans – Great travel blog with reviews of specific rooms the bloggers have stayed in with Roomorama.  Sometimes it’s nice to be able to read room reviews like the ones here, so that you don’t have to worry about a place you’ve rented being in a really dodgy neighborhood.  This blogged helped me quite a bit in navigating the labyrinth of lodging choices in Istanbul. 

·      Legal Nomads – I love this site for information and inspiration pre-departure.  It’s a good place to compile your packing, vaccination, and visa information before you head out on a big trip, and the beautiful pictures just make you want to explore.

FOOD

·      Anthony Bourdain – You can probably tell that food is usually the most important part of travel for me.  Often when I arrive in a place, I’m too tired to sift through the online message boards in search of the best places to eat in my area.  In these cases, I simply google Anthony Bourdain + city I’m in – and bam – a link to a show where he explored the city and his recommendations/reviews of specific places he was taken for meals.  The great thing about Bourdain is that he is very honest in his review of food.  Also, he tends to go to local favorites as opposed to overly expensive tourist traps.  In Istanbul, we watched his show before going out for dinner one night and found one of the best (and cheapest things) we had the entire time we were there.

Foodspotting – This website is Pinterest for Food (by location).  Let’s just say you’re going to visit an entirely new city and you want to know where to grab some good meals.  You sort by $,$$,$$$/neighborhood/type of food and are then greeted by perfectly square and colorful pictures of specific dishes in your area as well as user reviews of each dish.  There’s nothing worse than being in a new place and wanting to eat something good…and then feeling disappointed after you’ve wrongly chosen a place to eat that looked promising.  Foodspotting helps me to avoid this situation.   The Foodspotting “Guides” function is also great for inspiration, particularly in major cities.

·      Chowhound – This site is basically a message board for foodies.  Type in the name of a city and then scan through hundreds of user posts about great spots in any neighborhood you look up.  It hasn’t led me astray yet!

POSTCARDS

·      Touchnote – APP – Touchnote is a relatively new app that allows you to upload your iphone pictures and turn them into postcards.  You can type the text onto the back of the card and have it sent (just import the addresses you want to use) to friends and family.  The only drawback – no stamps from foreign places, but not having to figure out how the heck to buy stamps or find a post office seems to be a big payoff in my book.  I haven’t actually used this one yet, but I plan to while on the road.  Who doesn’t love a little snail mail??