Surfing for Savings
These websites can save
you big money when you book
your next trip
• Twitter.com Surprise! This trendy social-networking site, best known for its brevity (posts are no more than 140 characters in length), offers a new way to find vacation deals. Just create an online account,
then type a company’s name in the
site’s “Find People” box. Next you’ll
see the company’s username—click
on that to check out deals. Bargains
can be fleeting, so act fast. Twitter
fares from United, such as Phoenix
to Denver for $53 one way, last only
two hours. Starwood recently featured rooms starting at $69 at its Las
Vegas hotels. CruiseSource.us also
posts sales, such as a $798 special for
a seven-night cruise on Royal Caribbean, with a $150 onboard credit
plus $50 toward shore excursions.
To subscribe to a company’s Twitter
feed, just click on the “Follow” link.
• Voyij.com This site searches for domestic and international
deals—last-minute specials and
undersold inventory, from hotels to
flights—and posts them in one place.
You can plug in an originating city
(to learn what’s on sale today) or filter searches by dates, hotel ratings,
price, or desired experience ( beach
or skiing, for example). We recently
found a room at the Tropicana on
the Vegas Strip for $29 per night.
• Inside Trip.com Lots of air- fare search engines are on the Web,
but this one has a twist: it rates itineraries on 12 quality factors such as
legroom, aircraft age, and security
wait times, with each flight scoring
up to 100 points. We found a January fare from Boston to Los Angeles,
with one stop, for $257 roundtrip
and a total of 75 points. But spending $42 more pushed our trip quality to 95 points—pointing us to a
nonstop flight with more legroom.
• BedandBreakfast.com Last-minute planners can access
hundreds of the upcoming week’s
“Hot Deals” at B&Bs, country inns,
and historic hotels. Specials posted
once a month can include discounts
for B&B getaways booked online. If
you visit the site in January, you’ll
find its “Best Deal Ever”: make an
online reservation that includes a
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or
Thursday and get 20 percent off
midweek dates. Sale rates are valid
for travel booked from January 1
through March 30.
• TripAdvisor.com This popu- lar site for traveler reviews—with
more than 25 million posted—also
offers new features to help you book
cheaper trips. A “Fees Estimator”
calculates the total cost of domestic
flights—going beyond ticket prices
from airlines and factoring in baggage fees. And a vacation-rentals
calculator (find it at tripadvisor
.com/#Calculator) compares the
cost of a hotel with a rental. A recent
scenario: Two people staying five
nights in Miami could have saved
as much as $330 by booking a rental
instead of a hotel. —Laura Daily
