Top 10 Travel Planning Websites

Dear Visitors,

We are pleased to introduce our new section - Travel Resources.

As a launch, we would like to share with you in this post our list of Top 10 Travel Planning Websites that we have found them useful in the course of our pre travel planning and reseach.

This list will grow as we discover new websites. You are welcome to drop us a comment if you like to recommend some travel sites to be added to the list! :) You can bookmark the updated list here.

Hotel Research / Booking Sites

Agoda – Smarter Hotel Booking
Agoda (www.agoda.com) is good for hotel bookings in the Asia-Pacific region wih instant availability at more than 40,000 hotels. Partnering with Priceline.com enables them to extend their offerings to 180,000 hotels worldwide.

With the Agoda Rewards program, members can eran points, starting from their first reservation, getting 4-7% rewards cash back on every booking you make!




Hotelscombined – World's leading hotel price comparison experience

HotelsCombined.com is basically a hotel comparison site that allows you to instantly search and compare room availability and prices from all major travel websites, including Expedia, Hotels.com, Booking.com, Agoda (and many more) all in one set of search results.

We usually use it as a starting point to search for a hotel in the city we are visiting. By providing the price of the hotel from various booking sites thus allow us to have a good feel of the cost of the hotel.

Try the Search Engine below now!

Oyster.com - The Hotel Tell-All

Oyster.com differs from typical hotel booking sites as it offers unbiased reviews and real hotel photos from their own hotel investigators (staff). Hundreds of undoctored photos are taken for each listed hotel with even the smallest detail.

This site is interesting as it also compares actual photos versus the marketing photos provided by the hotel and some really have marked differences! ;)



 Tripadvisor – The World’s Largest Travel Site

Tripadvisor (www.tripadvisor.com) is a traveller community with mainly hotel rankings based from reviews from their members. 

Local experts provide travel advices ranging from transportation, attractions and dining choices in the tripadvisor forum.

We usually use it as a starting point to research on the places that we would like to visit when we plan our trips.


 
General Travel Booking Sites

Zuji - Your Online Travel Agency
ZUJI (www.zuji.com) is an online travel agent dedicated to bringing great value travel choices to travellers in Asia Pacific. Its choices include more than 400 airlines, 60,000 hotels, and thousands of car hire, activities, attractions and travel insurance. ZUJI has a network of online travel sites in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, India and Singapore.

We typically used ZUJI to compare travel packages (i.e. hotels + flights) to see if there are some good deals.


Travel Itineraries / Plans

Tripit – Organize Your Travel
Tripit (www.tripit.com) is a travel itinerary tool that consolidates and organises your bookings of airlines, hotels, rental cars and even restaurants.

You can just forward your travel bookings to an assigned tripit email address and Tripit will automatically take care of it.


We used the IOS app version in our travels and it certainly beats carrying pieces of paper itineraries which might get lost easily.


Airlines

Skyscanner

Skyscanner (www.skyscanner.net) is a leading flight comparison site with flexible search options mean you can browse prices across a whole month, or even a year, allowing you to get the best deals.

We use the IOS app to monitor airfares especially for US domestic carriers as they sometimes will drop prices for a day or two to atract bargain hunters like us.






Seatguru - The ultimate source for airplane seating, in-flight amenities, and airline information

 

Seatguru (www.seatguru.com) is a travel site that aims to help travellers select their aircraft seats. With more than 700 airplane seatmaps from nearly 100 different airlines, it will certainly help you make a better choice the next time you buy an airline ticket.







Train Travel

Seat61 - The Man in Seat Sixty-One...
Seat61 (www.seat61.com) is a wonderful website with detailed train travel tips and advices all around the world. From how to buy tickets to carriage cabin photos, it is certainly a great resource site for travellers who would prefer train to air travel for city pairs.

We had used it for our train trip planning in Switzerland and England and would recommend it to everyone.




Cruise

Cruise Critic – Cruise Reviews & News

Cruise Critic (www.cruisecritic.com) is a interactive community for both avid and first-time cruisers who enjoy the fun of planning, researching and sharing their passion for cruising.  There are also editorial contents which include cruise ship reviews, port of calls write-ups and destination articles.

It is our no 1 visited site we used for our Alaska Cruise Trip Planning.