Planes, trains and automobiles can get you to your vacation destination, but first, you've got to make travel and hotel reservations, learn about attractions and find the best deal. Luckily, there are Web sites to help you plan your trip and compare prices. We selected three of the most popular online travel sites:
Travelocity.com,
Expedia.com and
AOL Travel (AOL Keyword: travel) and tested them for usability, the most travel options and best prices for a trip to Las Vegas, using a budget of $2,000 for two people.
After much research and a couple of ill-fated attempts to convince the boss to let us actually take the Vegas trip ourselves, we selected Travelocity.com as our online travel site "best pick." | Bankrate.com's travel Web site report card | |
| Travelocity.com | A | A | A | A | A | | AOL Travel | C | C | A | A | B | | Expedia.com | A | C | A | B | B+ |
Travelocity.com -- "Best Pick"
Surfing Travelocity.com's cool-looking site gave us a little vacation from the whir of the fluorescent lights in the cube farm. Navigating through the site was much easier than navigating an airport, and we could even select a seat on the plane with handy airplane seat maps. Some of the great features of this site include daily deals, online reservations for cars, hotels, flights and cruises. Our favorite feature is the site's Dream Map; Tell Travelocity.com your budget, and it will give you a map of where you can go. If travel to a particular paradise will bust your budget, tell Travelocity's Fare Watcher and you'll be notified by e-mail if great rates come up. The site's featured vacations and hot spots section led us to our Las Vegas vacation options, and boy, did we hit the jackpot! After specifying our travel plans and budget, we received 12 pages of vacation packages for every popular casino/hotel on and around the strip. The deals included links to each hotel's Web site. If your idea of a vacation involves leaving Las Vegas, Travelocity.com highlights great fares to Europe for as low as $149. For those prices, you'll be eating bangers and mash in London before sundown. Another great feature at Travelocity.com is the travel news. Here's our final news flash: When it comes to finding a great price easily, Travelocity.com has your ticket. AOL Travel
AOL Travel offers lots of great information, features and deals, but it failed to deliver booking information on our fantasy trip to Las Vegas. We tested
AOL Travel (Keyword: travel) as a member, but for non-members, AOL.com has
discount travel information as well.
The channel has a simple and clean home page. Features include the ability to search for lower fares and make reservations for hotel rooms, air transportation and rental cars. Make your travel plans or get ideas by searching by package, price destination or activity (women's travel, adventurous travel or gay and lesbian travel.) AOL Travel suggested package deals for our trip to Las Vegas, but we were on our own when it came to finding the price and making reservations. AOL Travel didn't let us book online. The site offered phone numbers, so we could call the resorts ourselves and take care of the details. This site has its good points. We got a list of rates from several airlines. In fact, a quote from
AirTran Airlines beat the price available on the AirTran Web site. We'll take those kinds of savings any day.
AOL Travel feeds the community aspect of America Online with chats and message boards about travel concerns and destinations. It has travel tips, a newsletter with deals of the week, even maps and directions. Overall, we were pleased with the services AOL had to offer. But its emphasis is definitely more informational than E-commerce, leaving those who want to make reservations online in a holding pattern. Expedia.com
Expedia.com has online information and booking for flights, hotels, rental cars, vacations and cruises. But its site is poorly laid out. Its features aren't visually highlighted. We surf the Web a lot and want some eye candy to attract our peepers. We found our Vegas plans through a link under "special deals -- casino destinations." We were directed to the Las Vegas Reservation Systems. It lists oodles of hotels and gives reservation and pricing information on each. Expedia.com follows the Priceline.com model with its Flight Price Matcher. You enter how much you're willing to spend on a plane ticket, and if Expedia.com can find you that deal or better, your credit card is billed and you're on your way. One thing we really like about Expedia.com is that they have some great pictures, slide shows and a super-cool "featured destination" channel that includes a 360-degree tour of the selected cities. San Francisco was featured during our visit to Expedia.com, and our tour gave us a nice view without our faces getting salted with sea spray. Also "In my travel" is a great way to keep track of your travel itineraries, frequent flier miles and low travel fares. Expedia.com has a lot to offer customers, but we weren't impressed with its layout. A Web-friendly facelift would make us reconsider using Expedia.com in the future. Other options There are several options available when planning a trip, including local travel agents and booking directly through the airlines. Read more about travel planning options in our story "
Flying on the cheap." In the meantime, we're planning on reaching terminal Travelocity for our next trip.
|