2013’s Five Top Money Saving Travel Sites

How do you save money on travel by searching websites that promise you travel savings? Frankly, if you even tried to count the seemingly endless number of travel sites that attempt to compete for your attention and travel dollars then the time spent counting them would negate any time you might have for the actual travel. In addition, a lot of the sites out there just seem dodgy with pop ups and browser redirects that are just so suspicious.

So how do you separate the wheat from the chaff, the posers from the doers? Here is a list of the top five travel sites of 2013 that you can rely on and will save you money. While the discussion centers on airfare as the main example all of the sites offer full travel discounts.

Top Money Saving Travel Sites

Kayak

For obvious reasons Kayak is probably the dumbest name possible for a website that is great for finding you cheap flights however when you use the site and find great deals on airfare you’ll add it to your bookmarks and you’ll remember Kayak is for air deals when you see the name in your browser menu.

What Kayak does is look through all of the other billion or so travel websites to find the best deal and it does it well. You’ll find that the more flexible you are with time the more money you’ll be able to save this is also true if you have a bit of flexibility as to the destination as well. For instance you might find that landing at the second choice of a nearby airport saves you enough money to more than make up for the change. One awfully cool feature of the site is you put what you can afford to spend on travel and scan the globe for where those dollars will take you.

Bing

Bing is great in that it will help you whip out the plastic and make a travel commitment with its price predictor feature that tells you whether fares you’re looking for will go up or down in the near future. So you put in where you want to go to and when, and you’ll get a recommendation as to whether or not to buy now or wait a bit for the price to drop. Although the predictor tool is right most of the time, don’t expect it to be some can’t miss Genie in a bottle because it isn’t. What it does do well is save you money most of the time, and that can be priceless.

Airfare Watchdog

If you’re not the wait and see type of person that has the discipline to wait for a great deal then Airfare Watchdog might be for you. The staff at this site trolls the airline websites looking for fare sales, rewards programs, promo codes and discounted offers that they pass along to the their sites user base. They also pay close attention to smaller discount airlines like Allegiant and Southwest which don’t always make it into the bigger search engines like Bing.

WhichBudget.com

If you’re the type of person that actually likes saving money on budget airlines then you’ll love WhichBudget.com’s service which specializes in putting together flight plans based on budget carriers both domestically and globally. Pick your start and end point and chances are you’ll get a range of choices that includes at least one airline you’ve never heard of but is cheap enough to make the cut.

Yapta.com

If you find that you’re too busy to stay on top of the ever shifting travel prices then Yapta.com will keep track of price fluctuations and send you an notification via Twitter or email if the price of getting to your desired destination changes. What’s great about Yapta is that you’ll continue to get the notices even after you’ve purchased your ticket, and you can use those price shifts for refunds or additional travel vouchers when you’ve contacted the airlines to let them know you’re on top of it.

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written by: Aaron Mills

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Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net