VACATION PLANNING
 

There are so many travel websites out there. Can anyone please recommend a good site to help me plan a trip and find out about all of the events and fun things to do in the city I plan to visit?

I check all the sites. I just booked a trip to Miami a couple of hours ago. I checked airfare by the airlines, itasoftware.com, priceline, expedia, SideStep, and Orbitz. For the room I checked PlacesToStay.com, Travelocity, expedia, quikbook, hotels.com, hotelkingdom.com, hotwire, many individual hotel sites (Marriott.com, Starwood, etc) and biddingfortravel.

I then priced vacations with all of the above and in addition checked priceline, hotwire, and USAirwaysVacations.com.

For four nights hotel and roundtrip air for two, USAirwaysVacations.com had the cheapest price.

My advice, check as many resources that you have the patience to check.

Well, lots of cities have their own websites, so without telling us where you are going, that's a little hard.

This website has a wealth of information beyond the forums - click on Destinations and find yours.

Also, www.timeout.com has current info on what's happening in a variety of larger cities around the world.

Where are you going?

Karen

I like to get started at tripadvisor.com. Lots of information on many destinations.

Well, I don't know what city you are planning to visit, but one website I use sometimes to find out about different places is www.MyLeisureTrip.com. You can look up any city in the U.S. and it will list the events/ attractions worth visiting. Hope this helps. Good luck!

I would just go directly to the city's website and look up all the fun stuff to do that is rated. That's what I usually do. And sometimes they'll direct you to other websites to.. I usually try out all the general travel sites and look for the best deal. I generally find Orbitz to have the cheapest prices--Oh-you can also look up destination packages on these websites, and they'll tell you the touristy things to do. Hopefully this helps!

One of my favorites is Epinions.com
On the lefthand side, there is a list of things that people have given their opinions on, and one of them is destinations. Click on destinations, then find the destination you are looking for. Click on that destination, and then click on the person giving the advice. When you do this, you'll usually get an entire trip report from that person.

I do what GoTravel does: I spend time checking out various websites and making notes of how much things cost. I then do a comparison between airfare and hotel costs against packages that include both. Spending the time to search around definitely pays off. Its amazing how much a single airfare can vary from one website to another.