Travel apps

[Benny Profane]

Maybe should be in the trip report section, but where? Anyway, I posted about Red River, NM, where I skied yesterday on my Taos trip, and looked around and thought that there was a lot of cheap beds. So I went to my old friend Booking.com, and only found two properties. My buddy said, try Orbitz, and, lo and behold maybe twenty plus properties. Huh. Covid messed up the travel biz, and I guess a lot of hotels left Booking. What do you use these days on road trips, and where?

 

[Temp6]

Expedia has been very solid as of recently with a much improved interface and plenty of deal options. I've used it recently for flights, cars, and even hotel/home rentals. Airbnb always has a bunch of good options too but it gets a bad wrap from the hospitality industry for skimming too much out of the local economies where their rentals exist in.

Here's a neat little trick:
Pull up google maps alongside your preferred app search engine. Usually you can get a good idea of the exact location of any rental in the app's listing page. Then, hop on google maps and you can often find the same rental but through the actual owner's website. This allows you to cut out the middle man, book direct, and make sure all of your payment goes to the economy of the area rather than a chunk to 3rd party apps.

 

[Benny Profane]

Smart.

I always use Tripadvisor to cross reference reviews. Works much better in Europe.

 

[Temp6]

Love the tripadvisor forums, they have "advised" my trip planning on many occasions but I never used it for actually booking anything. I'll definitely admit the method I described above works best for international trips. Sometimes all that's listed is a whatsapp number on the google maps property pages but even that still works well for getting a better price and cutting out the middle man corpos.

 

[Andy_ROC]

In addition to above mentions, Kayak pulls info from many travel sites.

Googling town name and lodging can also uncover places that might be missing from travel specific sites. For instance I don't think the Brownell Chalet at TSV is on any travel site.