Friday, March 28, 2008

Going to Take A Vacation - Take Advantage of the Web

How do you organize your vacation? Following the path made by your colleagues, mates or relatives? Everyone of us must remember the holiday that was arranged in the last hour by the traveling agency. But you might want to organize your own "individual" journey and then the complexity appears: which hotels to choose and what transport to use. Planning your trip in your individual way is not just a psychological but also an material advantage, as the cost of special internet promotions proposed by airways and hotels are mostly lower than that proposed by travel bureaus in the "real" life. Futher, I offer some solutions which result from my own experience of arranging vacation by global network.

The primary phase of the planning process is buying the tickets for the transport you would like. Expedia.com, travel.com, cheapflights.com, all those sites provide the booking of tickets of a huge amount of airways. The first position is now held by Expedia - the largest and the well-known resource which, as it is stated on the site, "brings customers everything they want for researching, planning, and ordering the entire journey". Expedia consists of a huge amount of different catalogues that include the data about many hotels and other places to have a rest, but if we match it with Travel.com we will see that Travel.com is quite comprehensive and even not advanced client is able search out the apt information. You can find the cheapest tickets on cheapflights.com but there is no guaranty that the travel would be very comfortable. The quality often corresponds to the cost. I was fortunate, though, to book a roundtrip ticket from London to Washington for only $480 and had a pleasant flight.

Actually, a lot of websites nowadays propose hotels deals together with tickets. Expedia.com and Travel.com are exactly such sites of "multiple" booking. It is great that you can simply solve the problem of booking the tickets and look for the hotel on one site. But you can't be assured that booking "flight+hotel" you won't be leaded by the system, so that you book the flight and definite hotel Expedia or Travel.com need to sell rather than you make your own choice. In quest of a website where I would be able to evade being leaded by the reservation system to the proposal of its choice, I hit on two resources specializing in hotel booking: venere.com and catalogue.horse21.net. Personally, however, I preferred the interface and the structure of Horse21. The booking process on Horse21.net is simpler and better-organized than on Venere.com (I attempted to book some of the Paris hotels in both systems), so I had no problem to search and book a hotel which I selected from about 20 similar ones leaded by costs, descriptions and clients' reviews accessible on a single click upon the title of the hotel.

Don't forget that to move inside the country which you want to visit you may have to use some kind of transport too. To book railway tickets, for example, it is good to look for national resources offering tickets of the state you're going to - it was what I did once at sncf.fr. To enjoy the journey, take care about all the organizing actions are prepared duly. You can successfully complete it utilizing global network!


Source: http://www.therealarticles.com/Article/Going-to-Take-A-Vacation---Take-Advantage-of-the-Web/149008

No comments: