The internet makes cheap independent travel realistic for almost everybody. There are stacks of useful sites that I could recommend, but the following eight sites are the ones that I couldn’t imagine planning a trip without.
Opodo
There are a bunch of airline comparison sites — Skyscanner is another — but none of them is as easy to use as Opodo. Enter a route and a date and it’ll scan dozens of airlines to tell you the cheapest fare. (It doesn’t scan Ryanair, so you’ll have to manually check that.) Or, if you prefer, use the EscapeMap to inspire your wanderlust, or check the Late Deals to find out when the cheapest flight to your chosen destination leaves.
Wikitravel and Wikipedia
Wikitravel is the Wikipedia of travel guides — it’s composed of open-source information, editable by all-comers. The coverage is patchy, but for most major destinations you’ll find excellent and up-to-date detail. You can also share your own wisdom by editing articles yourself! Wikipedia, on the other hand, is most useful for its articles on airports. Want to find out quickly which airlines fly to a certain airport? The airport’s page on Wikipedia will tell you. What’s more, most of these pages contain information on ground transportation to and from the airport, meaning you don’t have to trawl through cumbersome airport websites in order to find it. For an example, take a look at the page for Budapest Airport.
Click “continue reading” to see the other five sites…
Bahn.de
This site contains rail timetables for the whole of Europe. Need to know how long it takes to get from Oslo to Stavanger by train? Or are you curious about how long it would take to travel from London to Volgograd by train? You can find out here. (For the record, the Volgograd trip can be done in 62 hours, with as little as three changes!) Note that you’ll often need to insert the native names for cities — Moskva for Moscow, Roma for Rome, etc.
Google
I’ll skip over the obvious ways in which Google is useful. My favourite Google trick for travel planning involves currency conversion. You’re researching a trip to Norway, and you find out that a hostel costs 200NOK…which is, of course, no use if you don’t know the exchange rate. I used to use xe.com for such predicaments, but it’s a bit of a faff. It’s far simpler to just type “200NOK in GBP” into Google, and voila! You learn that the hostel costs £19.93. (This also works in words, e.g. “200 Norwegian Kroner in GBP”.)
Google Maps
Google Maps has gotten more and more useful recently, now that Streetview has come to Europe. What’s more, coverage of Eastern European cities has greatly improved — the new detailed streetmap of Kiev, for example, is a great resource. Here are a couple of other things the site is useful for. First: distances on a map can often be opaque, but the ‘directions’ feature will estimate the walking distance between two points for you. No more walking for 90 minutes because “it didn’t look very far on the map!” Second, there’s some very useful public transport information. For example, zoom in on Warsaw and click on one of the blue tram stop icons. This overlays the map with a detailed map of the tram network, which could be really useful for trip-planning.
Hostelworld
There are lots of hostel repositories, but Hostelworld is my favourite. You can search for hostels on a map, which is great if you want to stay (e.g.) near the main rail station in order to catch an early train. You can read thousands of other travellers’ reviews of hostels. You can also book using PayPal, which is a nice feature.
Lonely Planet (inc. Thorn Tree)
We all know and love LP books — but their website is an excellent resource too. As well as snippets about each country, and a shop containing all their publications, they offer the neat feature of being able to purchase their travel guides chapter-by-chapter in pdf form. So for a trip to four countries you might only need to purchase five or six chapters, at a cost of around £2-5 each, rather than four books at a cost of £10-15 each. LP also host the excellent Thorn Tree forum, which is a great place to ask any questions relating to your travels. They’ve helped me on several occasions.
Of course, each individual trip will require visiting more specialised and specific sites. There are also plenty of other general sites that are worth a visit (e.g. TripAdvisor). But these eight sites are the ones that I couldn’t imagine planning a trip without.
What do you think? Have I missed any key travel sites?
[...] useful when planning trips to obscure destinations — many of them can be found in my post on Essential Web Tools for Independent Travellers. I’ll post more as I find [...]