Travel

My other half used to work for Expedia for a while, so I've heard a lot about the industry and how the affiliate sites like cheapoair operate. One site I use often is wotif.com. They mainly do hotel rooms, not flights though. They are similar to lastminute in that they specialise in rooms during the last 2 or 3 weeks prior to the date of your stay and you can get some really cheap deals if you're prepared to wait until that timeframe and aren't too picky about exactly where you want to stay. As far as flights go, no-one makes any coin on flights (all the margin is in accommodation and extras like car rental) so you may as well book through one of the big name sites.

I love to travel a lot, but unfortunately I've only been to Turkey, Russia and Azerbaijan... I'd like to see the whole Europe, especially UK and Germany..... I'm currently saving for a small summer trip in Europe... Cheap but quality deals are of my interest too.. Please share your experiences, and YellowBoots, thanks for such a fantastic thread 🙂

I would like to travel in France, especially Paris, but unfortunately it's very expensive 😢 I've just read about Kim Ki-Duk who went to Paris without a penny and earned for living by painting the people in the streets. I think I can try this one 😀

You know travel is absolutely my favorite thing in the world. The site I use is that ITA Software Matrix site. This is basically the company that supplies a lot of the big travel agency companies with their software. The site is: http://matrix.itasoftware.com/.

My advice is to use this site to see what all of the current fares are and then to either buy the ticket on the site of the website of the airline itself or using someone like an expedia or travelocity that does not charge you its own fee. The latter is usually the case if there is complicated routing or multiple airlines involved.

Actually, Google picked up this company a bit ago and there were some legal issues in the states because of this because authorities feared it could give Google a monopolistic position. They have a pilot flight booking service up for some routes in the United States: http://www.google.com/flights/

As for my next destinations: Southeast Asia (Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam) and the near/middle East (Lebanon, Jordan) are currently tops of my list. Lebanon is probably first - so much interesting history, excellent food, and such a fascinating mix of cultures.

BB84 that ITA site is a good find. Thanks for sharing that.

Also one other thing if you have to arrange a long flight that requires a refuel stop, play around with the stopover city options a bit and you can often find a cheaper deal. A few years back I have to go Sydney - Barcelona and you couldn't do it direct. Instead it was telling me I had to go Sydney - Singapore - London - Barcelona which was a mammoth trip. So I tried a few different stopover cities (Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok etc) and I found a flight that went Sydney - Hong Kong - Paris - Barcelona instead which was a couple of hours shorter and cost me $200 less. I was still wrecked for a few days by the time I got there...