Nowadays, along with the ever-increasing needs in travel and tourism of people around the world, many booking sites have been created as a handful of tools for visitors to ensure that their trip wouldn’t turn out to be such a terrible experience right at the initial point. This article will provide you with a list of the best sites to book trips with multiple services. If you’re only into booking hotels, check out our article about the best hotel booking sites.
Online booking sites are fantastic, since they help you plan your trip for a peace of mind, as well as offer you a fun way to get yourself excited ahead of your upcoming journey. You can simply go on an online booking site or app to plan for most parts of your trip - transportation, accommodation, and other services at ease. So what makes one site better than others?
While the services offered by many websites are similar, it’s the interface that distinguishes them. When you are planning for a vacation to be relaxed and enjoyable, the last thing you need is a stressful, complicated website.
In this article, Cabinzero will review some of the best sites to book trips based on their price, and also on their operation - with simplicity and clarity as the key features to be examined. Additionally, we’ll make sure these travel sites charge no extra fees in the last minutes. Plus, reward schemes will also be taken into account, which would help you to save some money using the booking site more than once in the longer term.
So let’s get started, shall we?
Photo bytopntp - stock.adobe.com
Expedia.com - Best Travel Booking Site Overall
Expedia, owned by Expedia Inc., is renowned as one of the biggest and most popular vacation booking sites, especially in the Asia travel market. Although Expedia owns two other sites, Hotels.com and Hotwire.com, we’re fans of the original thanks to its clean and simple to use interface.
With more than 600 million visitors accessing its website, Expedia offers its clients all over the world with a wide range of services including hotel booking, flight deals, and other services.
When you visit this vacation booking site's packages section, you can add up to five connecting flights, decide on accommodation for all or parts of your trip, and tag on car rentals as well. (Interested in more information about car rentals? Check out Best car rentals sites)
It's all very well laid out, and it only takes a few seconds to start planning your trip. If there were a few more options to filter out accessibility issues, it would be the best experience for customers . Still, Expedia.com has everything most people need, and there's even the option of cruise lines if you fancy it.
Furthermore, customers will receive additional discounts for booking multiple parts of your vacation via the site. A Things To Do section completes the site's attempt to help you plan your entire trip in one location.
Overall, Expedia.com is one of the best travel booking sites, providing travellers with comprehensive information and straightforward interface, that offers its customers as much comfort as possible to use.
Booking.com - A Vacation Booking Site With The Best Reward Programs
Launched in 1996, Booking.com is a giant in the online booking industry with 44 different languages available, providing its customers with access to the website at ease. It is known as a cheap holiday booking site as it promises the most affordable pricing on all types of properties, ranging from accommodations, transportation to other services.
Because Booking.com provides its guests with more than 1 million properties in about 277 countries and territories, the website’s interface may be a bit overwhelming and confusing for visitors to use.
However, with a fantastic rewards program, Booking.com is a worthy option that keeps you coming back to the website, making it easier to use once you become accustomed.
You can even book a taxi through this website, leaving you with very little to think about when you get on the road because everything has been planned. What’s more, you needn't pay a booking fee on hotels, which allows you to be flexible when travelling a long distance.
Cheaptickets.com - Best Holiday Package Website If You Have Different Needs
Despite being a booking site acquired by Expedia, along with Hotels.com and Hotwire.com, Cheaptickets.com is a bit different in terms of operation. For package deals, you can easily add on a flight, a hotel, and a car, or any combination of the three, though multiple flights are under a different option.
With Cheaptickets.com, you can also purchase event tickets from the site, which is far more useful if you want to buy the whole trip in one place. Other sites offer the same thing, but CheapTickets is a little more eager to entice you into the process, even if its interface isn’t as modern as others.
On Cheaptickets, there’s the section Vacation Value Finder, where you can somewhat plan your vacation ahead by giving information on how much you are willing to spend for your trip and what you feel like experiencing, then receiving some fun suggestions from the site. This is a great choice for people who are not yet settled their heart down in one place til the last minute.
If you’re a student, verify yourself and you’ll get extra discounts from Cheaptickets. All in all, Cheaptickets is one of the best sites for holiday packages for various needs of a trip.
Kayak.com - The Best Online Booking Site When You’re in A Rush
If you’re in a hurry to book your trip, Kayak will be pretty useful. Kayak is one of the popular hotel search engines, as its goal is to simplify the process of looking for accommodation for a trip. All you need to do is enter a destination, and the site will generate plenty of results from multiple different sources for you to choose from.
Even though this means that you don’t directly book trips through Kayak, and the adverts are sometimes a little overwhelming, the website does help you to get the results quickly and without wandering around on the Internet searching by yourself.
Since you’re going to be sent to another website with full details afterwards, Kayak’s interface is rather basic. It contains numerous filters for you to use along with critical information you could require. Also, the website has a deal section where you can choose the most suitable price for hotels and car rentals.
What makes it even better and more handy for you is that on Kayak, whichever travel site with lowest pricing will be highlighted in green. Therefore, you can instantly see the best deal out of the choices you have!
However, the best offer from Kayak (which makes it to this list of best sites to book trips) should be its discount for Kayak’s members. By joining Kayak’s email membership list, you will receive a discount of up to 35% on a travel choice.
Photo by day2505 - stock.adobe.com
Agoda.com - Best Booking Site for Asian Private Home Rentals
Agoda.com or just Agoda, is a Singapore online travel agency that specialises in apartment and private rentals along with hotels and flights booking.
Rated as the best website to book hotels, Agoda’s customer service is undeniably top-notch. If you are lost in different choices of unique destinations and couldn’t decide until the last minute, feel free to change your mind as there is a 24-hour cancellation policy in place.
Furthermore, even though Agoda’s interface is quite easy to use, you are offered a 24-hour multilingual customer service to help you out whenever you encounter trouble booking your trip on Agoda.
Another plus using Agoda is that there will be plenty of reviews on the destinations, so you’ll have other visitors’ opinions to rely on except from just pictures or videos before booking an accommodation, flight or service.
Traveloka.com - Best Site for Hotel Deals
Traveloka, a popular online booking site in Indonesia, is available in most of the Southeast Asia nations. With a wide range of over 120,000 hotels around the area and all around the globe, as well as over 100,000 different routes in Asia, Europe and America have also partnered with Traveloka to provide low-cost policies.
Traveloka offers not only flight tickets, hotels, motels, villas booking but also other rentals services, excursions, etc. Many customers choose Traveloka as their to-go booking site because of its simple and straightforward interface.
Apart from the most economical pricing, this travel site also has a section called “Price Alert” to warn you before you decide to book anything.
Another plus that makes Traveloka one of the best holiday deals websites is its monthly discounts program, where you can take advantage of and save up to 30% of the flight tickets and hotel room charges. Therefore, if you are interested in visiting countries in Southeast Asia, consider Traveloka as your trip assistant to plan your trip at ease!
AIRBNB
Airbnb, which stands for Airbed and Breakfast, is a startup project that allows people who need a rented room to connect with people whose rooms are for rent from all over the world via a mobile app and the website airbnb.com.
Although Airbnb is not a “standard” online booking site as many others listed on this list, it is still a worth considering tool for travellers. Because the price of accommodations on this website is cheaper compared to typical hotel services.
Furthermore, Airbnb is not just a renting service, but also a way to promote cross-cultural understanding between visitors and the “landlords”. If you enjoy travelling within a large group or with your family, renting a villa with low cost is easy using Airbnb. Otherwise, you can save some money on housing by sharing a room with other people at Airbnb.
Google Hotels
We’re all aware that Google is the world’s largest search infrastructure, but do you know that it has engines searching for hotels as well? If you are already (and you should be) familiar with Google platform, Google Hotels won’t disappoint you in terms of its simplicity and straightforwardness!
With the assistance of Google Hotels, hotel management companies can increase their exposure and bookings by allowing customers to search and book hotel rooms online.
Additionally, customers using Google Hotels are able to foresee the hotel pricing and services available right on the platform’s interface. What’s more interesting is that this engine also browses things you can do on your trip, and all you have to do is typing your destinations on the search bar.
Trivago.com
Similar to Kayak.com, Trivago is an online engine that allows users to compare hotel prices in just a few clicks from over 300 different booking sites for around 5 million hotels, motels, and other types of lodging in 190 nations all around the globe. There are also filters for you to refine your finding results and get the best option that fits your needs for your trip.
Besides these, the hotel reviews section - with more than 175 million aggregated ratings and over 19 million images, is another handy tool that assists you in the process of finding out the best accommodation for your trip.
Momondo
Having difficulties using Kayak and Trivago? Take a look at Momondo instead! Momondo is a Danish airline search engine, which was founded in 2006. Until now, Momondo has become one of the most favourable search engines by many of the travellers seeking for inexpensive flights and accommodations.
Based on your search, Momondo will summarise plenty of results of hotels, motels, etc. and lead you straight to the travel booking site (or travel agency and hotel site) of whichever places you are interested in to book for your room. By that, you can be confident in the reliability of the room you’re going to book.
One disadvantage that may make you enjoy Momondo less is that there isn’t a membership level.
Priceline.com - Best Booking Site for Unbiased Reviews
Priceline.com is one of the best holiday package websites in the travel industry for a good reason. The site’s easy to use, providing its customers with options of flight booking, accommodation booking, car rentals, or even a whole package consisting of these three.
The most exciting thing about this site should be the review section, where dozens of reviews are all from verified customers. Booking online might be surprisingly exhausting sometimes, as you have to spend your time checking and checking whether the illustrations of one place match to itself in reality. Priceline really does you a favour, offering reasonably accurate pictures of what to expect from wherever you’re considering to choose for your upcoming trip.
Overall, Cabinzero has introduced some of the best online booking sites in the travel industry for your consideration upon your upcoming trip. With the given information, we hope you will be able to enjoy your travelling, having your trip planned ahead using any of our recommendations.
Photo bypikoso.kz - stock.adobe.com
FAQs
What to look for in an online travel site?
There are plenty of travel booking sites with multiple services available; therefore, having in mind some factors to judge and compare these sites may help you to sort out the most suitable one for you. To have you covered, Cabinzero has selected some important features for you to rely on when accessing an online travel site as follow:
International Booking
Nowadays, almost every travel booking site offers international flight booking service, so it is actually quite challenging to decide on a website. What differs these travel sites is actually the discount programmes.
You can have a look through several online booking sites, and see which provide you with the most affordable pricing to make your final decision. If you have more concerns on flight tickets and such, read our article on best sites for flight booking to have a deeper look into this.
Travel Package
Travel packages allow you to save some money by combining flights, hotel reservations, car rentals and other services as well. While some companies provide you with their travel packages so you can get to your destination with the cheapest price possible, others allow you to mix and match flights, hotels, car rentals and other services on your own to fit your schedule.
These kinds of travel packages are included in most of the websites listed above, so feel free to re-read our article for more specific information.
What is a good site to book a day trip?
As we have examined a wide range of online booking sites beforehand, we believe that any of the sites listed in our article above is capable of providing you with most of your needs, no matter if it’s a business trip, a long vacation or just a day-off from your busy life. Go check out these booking sites and find yourself the most suitable one!
Is Makemytrip a reliable website to book international trips?
Even though not being on the list above, Makemytrip - with a life span of more than 20 years, is a reliable source for you if you are travelling across India or between India and other countries all over the world, especially the US.
The website’s interface is a bit overwhelming since it’s filled with flight deals, accommodation deals and also adverts. Therefore, if you cannot bear the amount of ads appearing on the site, there are a lot more other choices for you to choose from!
Lam Tran
