As we head into the travel season, I thought it would be useful to cover the websites that help make travel just a bit easier.

By David J. Bilinsky

kayak.com

Kayak is quite simply the best travel reservation site that I have found.

There are many travel sites out there, including Expedia.com and Travelocity.com. But I personally like Kayak (www.kayak.com), TripIt (www.tripit.com) and StarAlliance (www.staralliance.com/en/) since I am an Air Canada frequent flier points member. 

Kayak allows me to quickly search and view possible flights from all different airlines, which is particularly important when booking a multiple-city trip. You can also search for hotels, cars etc.

www.tripit.com

TripIt allows you to manage your itineraries by simply emailing TripIt a copy of your airline booking, car reservation, hotel reservation etc. TripIt builds a mobile online trip itinerary that you can then share with those with whom you are travelling. Quick, easy and free.

www.staralliance.com/en/

Since I prefer to collect Star Alliance flight points if I can (Air Canada, United etc), I always check any possible trip against the flights that I can see at Star Alliance. This allows me to compare the flights/routings that I get from kayak.com with the flights that I could get on the Star Alliance network to determine which flights to finally select. 

www.hotels.ca 

Hotels.ca is a great site to find hotels around the world (priced in Canadian Dollars!). I have used this site many times and it has never led me wrong. Hotels are as described, prices are honoured and reviews (at least from my experience) are accurate. Great site for Canadians travelling in or out of Canada!

www.hipmunk.com

Hipmunk is a cool new travel search site that tries to take the agony out of travel planning. Rather than presenting flight options to you in a text list, Hipmunk delivers to you a graphic timeline of each flight, with the length of the flight shown as a color bar “stretched” out across the page. In other words, the longer a flight (i.e. the greater number of connections) the longer the bar (known as the “agony view”).

Hotel results are shown on a map so that people can view where in a destination they will be staying and the landmarks near them.

www.seatguru.com

This site allows you to check virtually every scheduled flight and aircraft flown by the airlines of the world and see the seat configuration on the aircraft for your flight. It allows a quick scan prior to selecting seats to see if you have a good seat, a seat with some drawbacks, a poor or blocked seat or a standard one.

www.tripadvisor.com

TripAdvisor is great for reviewing hotels prior to booking a reservation. Raising the ire of hoteliers everywhere (“no establishment is above a negative review on TripAdvisor,” says The Guardian), the (one hopes) honest and trustworthy reviews haven’t let me down yet. You can see snapshots of the rooms, read about the quality of the breakfasts and the politeness (or not) of the staff. Despite the concern of fake reviews, they state that they have a number of measures in place to weed out such posts. Always worth checking prior to booking.

 

www.bedbugregistry.com 

And last but certainly not least is the bed bug registry. Here you can check out hotels, rental suites and now cruise ships to see if you may be booking into an establishment that has been reported as having bed bugs. At the time of writing this column, Vancouver is reported as having over 2000 reports of bed bugs, most of them being in the West End.

The views expressed herein are strictly those of the author and may not be shared by the Law Society of British Columbia. David J. Bilinsky is the Practice Management Advisor for the LSBC. Email: daveb@lsbc.org; Blog: www.thoughtfullaw.com.

This article originally appeared in the October 2011 issue of BarTalk and is reproduced here with permission of both the author and the Canadian Bar Association, British Columbia Branch.