Searching Online for Cheap Flights, Hotels, and Trip Ideas

I fly out tonight to Las Vegas, so I figured it would be fitting to do a post on tips on planning a trip using all the available online tools.

To search for flights, sites like SideStep or Kayak are the best. They ping and submit your search to all of the major airline in addition to sites such as Travelocity and Expedia. It then aggregates all of the results onto one screen. Their websites are also very well designed, using AJAX to let you filter items without having to submit or refresh the page. The one negative is that they do not search the low cost airlines like SouthWest, AirTran, and JetBlue, so I search those individually, depending on where I'm going. There are sites that claim to do the same thing as SideStep and Kayak, except they include the low-cost airlines, but I find that they are actually still inferior and it's still easier and more reliable to find better deals the way I suggest.

As for hotels, I find that Hotels.com does a very good job. They have really improved their site over the years to become truly a paradigm of Web 2.0 technology. There are a ton of user reviews for each hotel, the site uses a mash-up with Navteq to show where hotels are located in relation to landmarks and attractions, and the site is rich with interactive components using AJAX without refreshing or submitting pages. The tool is the easiest to use out of all the sites, and provides great deals on hotels. They even provide coupons from time-to-time to give you an even bigger deal on hotel rooms than you can find on other sites.

Finally, if you just want to go somewhere as long as it's cheap and interesting, I would keep an eye on TravelZoo. Signing up (for free) to receive their top 20 deals makes it easy to keep an eye out for a good deal that looks interesting and fun.