I don’t know about you, but I successfully spoiled the early booking season, and only now I sat down to plan a New Year’s trip. This gave me the idea to share those Internet resources that can very cool help out even at the last minute, regardless of the country in which you are going. I already mentioned some on my websites and in mailing lists, I will tell about others for the first time. Well, which one you will like more, choose for yourself ...
Travelata.ru - online supermarket for tours
Frankly speaking, I myself prefer to plan my trip "from and to", and rarely turn to the services of tour operators. Therefore, further on the list will be presented resources devoted to one or another aspect of the journey. Travelata in this listing looks like a white crow, and so I decided to start with it.
The project, which is a tour supermarket, first came into view when the recruiting agency Pruffi included Travelat in its top thirty best Russian-speaking Internet startup teams. A little later, the service also appeared in Forbes, after which it became simply indecent to ignore it.
In the context of our list, this is a service for the lazy, which allows you to find (and if you want to pay) a tour without leaving your laptop. For those who do not like to wave their payment card on the Internet wherever possible, there is an option to send an application. Less risky and more informative. For example, I took advantage of it. Keep away from sin.
Another interesting point is the guarantee of the best price. Travelata promises to sell the tour at the lowest cost available for booking from one of the 120 largest tour operators. And it is also worth a lot ...
Aviasales.ru - a search engine for cheap flights and convenient connections
I talked about the popular Russian metasearch engine for cheap flights Aviasales, which has settled its office in sunny Thailand, more than once. Once, about 6 years ago, I looked after this idea in the "bourgeois" and since then raved about it until I found out that the more agile guys had already created a Russian-language analogue.
Since then, a lot of water has flowed, and now you can hardly surprise anyone with a cheap air ticket search engine. But I continue to use Aviasales, and even installed its application on my Androidphone. Maybe sentimentality. Or just a habit. But the most convenient thing, you know ...
Download Aviasales free mobile app can be here:
- For iOS platform (iPhone and iPad) on the Appstore
- For Android on Google Play
Tripster - excursions from local people around the world
Another Russian travel project, "standing out from the crowd" and worth putting on a short list. If you know Russian-language counterparts, correct me, but I have not met yet.
Tripster is not just excursions, it is a walk through an unfamiliar city in the company of the same enthusiastic people like you. There are no usual hiking trails and guides in the tripster. Journalists, historians, photographers and simply creative and interesting people gathered here so that you can visit places that only locals know about, learn the city from the other side and look at it as if you had lived in it for more than one year.
To learn about the secret areas of Rome, ride a bike around Milan or follow the trail of the heroes of Dan Brown's “Inferno” novel ... There is nothing impossible with Tripster!
The database has more than 2000 excursions in 300 cities around the world, and this list is constantly growing. With detailed descriptions of excursions, reviews of tourists, the built-in ability to book, pay and protect the buyer, as well as a built-in system for answering questions, Tripster thought out all the slightest nuances for lovers of independent travel. Try it and you.
Booking.com- the most authoritative hotel reservation system
I think that sooner or later everyone is faced with the largest hotel booking portal, Booking.com, and the language does not turn out to call this resource a little-known. But in our review, we are not talking about little-known resources, but about the most convenient ones, and Booking in this regard is unlikely to soon meet a worthy competitor.
Nearly 400 thousand hotels and 24 million reviews, as well as more than 2 million nights booked weekly. The numbers speak for themselves. And although there are “evil languages” on the Internet, trying to find dark spots in it, Booking has been a booking system for more than 10 years, which is used by all significant market participants.
Rentalcars - car rental comparison and instant booking
The younger brother of Booking, Rentalcars performs the same function in the field of car rental as Aviasales on air tickets - it monitors car rental prices at the largest car rental operators, leading them to a "common denominator", which, in turn, makes it easy and quick to find the best car rental offers in minutes.
The service allows you to find cars at 6,000 rental locations in 180 countries, thus covering all areas that are more or less significant. However, the chip of Rentalcars, as for me, is not so much in finding the best price, but rather in the "common denominator" of conditions. This allows you to compare operators' offers not only in terms of cost, but also to service: insurance package, lack of daily mileage restrictions, various additional options, but you never know. Ultimately, such nuances can come out much more expensive than indicated in the distributor's brochure.
Rentalcars has quickly conquered the European market and is now rapidly developing ours. After all, the niche is gracious: every year there are more and more people who want to diversify their vacation by auto-travel.
KiwiTaxi - taxi from airports in 20 countries
Once on the pages of my travel sites I talked about useful foreign transfer services dedicated to ordering a taxi from airports to hotels. Now, just a few days ago, I came across a Russian-language analogue. Moreover, unlike the previously discussed services, this project allows you to call a taxi to the plane in many countries at once, and the number of served airports at the time of this writing has already exceeded 130.
So, KiwiTaxi is a resource that can be enjoyed by those travelers who do not really trust local taxi drivers (who are far from always honesty), prefer not to take risks with a car on the spot, and prefer to know the cost of the service in advance. The project is quite new, but with its positive history, after all - the convenience of the service is obvious.
Photo by: excursiopedia.com
