Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Frommers.com: The Complete Travel Resource
For an excellent travel-planning resource, we highly recommend
Frommers.com
(www.frommers.com), voted Best Travel Site by
PC
Magazine
.. We're a little biased, of course, but we guarantee that
you'll find the travel tips, reviews, monthly vacation giveaways, and
online-booking capabilities thoroughly indispensable. Among the spe-
cial features are our popular
Destinations
section, where you'll get
expert travel tips, hotel and dining recommendations, and advice on
the sights to see for more than 3,500 destinations around the globe;
the
Frommers.com Newsletter,
with the latest deals, travel tends, and
money-saving secrets; our
Community
area featuring
Message Boards,
where Frommer's readers post queries and share advice (sometimes
even our authors show up to answer questions); and our
Photo Center,
where you can post and share vacation tips. When your research is
done, the
Online Reservations System
(www.frommers.com/book_
a_trip) takes you to Frommer's preferred online partners for booking
your vacation at affordable prices.
unvarnished customer reviews and
ranks its properties according to the
AAA rating system. Also reliable are
Hotels.com
and
Quikbook.com.
An
excellent free program,
TravelAxe
(www.travelaxe.net), can help you
search multiple hotel sites at once,
even ones you may never have heard
of—and conveniently lists the total
price of the room, including the taxes
and service charges. Another booking
site,
Travelweb
(www.travelweb.com),
is partly owned by the hotels it repre-
sents (including the Hilton, Hyatt,
and Starwood chains) and is therefore
plugged directly into the hotels' reser-
vations systems—unlike independent
online agencies, which have to fax or
e-mail reservation requests to the
hotel, a good portion of which get
misplaced in the shuffle. More than
once, travelers have arrived at the
hotel only to be told that they have no
reservation. To be fair, many of the
major sites are undergoing improve-
ments in service and ease of use, and
Expedia will soon be able to plug
directly into the reservations systems
of many hotel chains—none of which
can be bad news for consumers. In the
meantime, it's a good idea to
get a
confirmation number
and
make a
printout
of any online booking trans-
action.
In the opaque-website category,
Priceline
and
Hotwire
are even better
for hotels than for airfares; with both,
you're allowed to pick the neighbor-
hood and quality level of your hotel
before offering up your money. Price-
line's hotel product even covers
Europe, though it's much better at
getting five-star lodgings for three-star
prices than at finding anything at the
bottom of the scale. On the downside,
many hotels stick Priceline guests in
their least desirable rooms. Be sure to
go to the BiddingForTravel website
(see above) before bidding on a hotel
room on Priceline; it features a fairly
up-to-date list of hotels that Priceline
uses in major cities. For both Priceline
and Hotwire, you pay upfront, and
the fee is nonrefundable.
Note:
Some
hotels do not provide loyalty program
credits or points or other frequent-stay
amenities when you book a room
through opaque online services.
