Legal Research

Less travelled travel websites travellers should visit before they venture out

By Dan Pinnington

The web has certainly transformed the travel industry, and given travellers access to all sorts of amazing info about flight options, hotels and everything else business or vacation travellers would ever want to know. My friends and fellow PMAs (practice management advisors) Jim Calloway from the Oklahoma Bar Association and Courtney Kennaday at the South Carolina Bar Association wrote ?Sites For Sore Eyes – The Travel Site Less Visited? which was published this month in the ABA General Practice, Solo & Small Firm Division eTechnology Newsletter. They mention several sites I regularly use, and a few I don?t, but clearly should.

I agree with Jim and Courtney, for finding out about flight options by take off and landing time I love Kayak (www.kayak.com).

Note that Porter flights don’t appear on Kayak or Trip Advisor.

If you are travelling on Air Canada, remember to checkout your options on both AirCanada.com and United.ca (they codeshare flights) as I have sometimes found cheaper prices on United.ca for the same flight.

For hotel reviews by guests, I think Kayak and Trip Advisor (www.tripadvisor) are great.

When I am looking at different hotels, I find Google Maps is great for helping me find out where hotels are located relative to one another and the other things I want to be close to when I am visiting another city.

And checkout the package deals on Kayak or Trip Advisor ? you will find amazing deals where flight, hotel and ground transport will be far less than then the cost of a flight booked separately.

For fare predictions Bing Travel (www.bing.com/travel) (formerly farecast.com) works nicely for US flights, but at times I have found the results to be dodgy on some Canadian flights.

Despite the fact they don?t mention a site that will help you find 120vAC in airports (one of my pet peeves when I travel – especially through Concourse C at ORD as I think there is only one working plug in the whole terminal!), a great article all travelers should read.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on September 16, 2009 (boomark / email).