Travel Sites Blog and Resources

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, travelers have vented their frustrations in countless pages of negative reviews. Many missed out on their vacations and lost money as well. As people start traveling again, should they use third-party travel sites to book flights, hotels, and other accommodations? Is it better to book directly with the airline or hotel? Travel experts weigh in on the pros and cons of online travel agencies. What are third-party travel sites or online travel agencies? Travel sites like Expedia and Travelocity are online travel agencies that give discount prices on airfare, hotels, and other amenities. Some sites specialize in airfare, like CheapOair, some in hotels like Booking.com, and others offer packages with many different accommodations.  Many travelers each year find cheap flight, hotel booking, and car rental deals on these sites, but how are the prices so low? Sometimes you may notice ads on the site that drive revenue, but most of the time these online travel agencies make money by helping you save money. How do travel sites make money? Names of prominent travel sites, like Expedia, hold a lot of weight in the travel industry. Many hotels and travel accommodation companies want to be associated with these brands because they know a lot of people search for travel on these sites. Small hotel chains and boutique hotels need the extra online traffic to get more bookings. It also helps that many people trust the travel sites they know and are willing to book with hotels they haven’t heard of. When travelers book a hotel room, they pay a standard rate based on the hotel’s prices. Travel sites, on the other hand, book a group of rooms, flights, or tours at a time and get a discounted rate. These sites then turn around and sell the travel accommodations at a discounted rate to the normal price, but above the discounted rate they bought it at. In this way, consumers save some money and the travel site makes money as well.  What are the difficulties of travel sites? Many travel sites became extremely popular in recent years for their great deals, but the disruption of the pandemic showed just how difficult to work with these sites can be. With future travel uncertain, Travel Expert Kendra Thornton shared some cautions to travelers looking at deals on travel sites.  Kendra Thornton TRAVEL Expert     Expert Tip I think these sites can sometimes offer compelling deals that are attractive to travelers, especially those on limited budgets. However, like everything ⁠— the better the price, the more restrictions they are that can make refunds, cancellations, or changes nearly impossible for travelers. Travelers need to weigh price versus flexibility when they book with these types of sites.   Another disadvantage of travel sites is how difficult it is to cancel. High call volume and inflexible policies are what many people experienced after the coronavirus pandemic hit. Kendra Thornton also said, “If the traveler isn’t having luck getting through to the customer service agent at the travel site, then they could try going directly to the hotel reservations for assistance. If they booked airfare with the third-party site, then they would have to handle any changes directly with the source that first booked the ticket ⁠— going directly to the airline would not help per airline rules.” Travelers should also be aware that some travel sites are owned by the same parent company, like how Expedia owns Travelocity and Booking.com, among others. Searching on those sites could yield different results, but it’s also possible that the deals will be the same.  Using a third-party site can also leave a larger margin of error in your vacation. Many travel sites seem to have a lack of transparency regarding where a traveler’s money goes and when a hotel or flight is actually booked. Using that third-party method can put a traveler at more risk of arriving without confirmed bookings.  What are the benefits of travel sites? Like mentioned above, travel sites book rooms and other accommodations in bulk, so their prices are often lower than booking directly with the travel company. This comes with whatever restrictions the site puts in place, but travelers will often pay less. Most sites have some sort of cancellation policy — it just might not be the most flexible. Some sites will allow free cancellation for 24 hours and others up until a few days before departure. This does allow for some wiggle room when finding the best vacation deals.  Another benefit of online travel agencies comes with vacation packages. Laura Mandala, CEO of Mandala Research, points out that a travel site might find a flight pattern that you may not have found yourself. Package deals with a hotel, flight, and rental car all included might also be much more expensive if you booked everything separately rather than in a vacation package. In this way a travel site deal might be worth it, but it depends on the traveler’s needs.  Travel sites also get their fame from easy use. Rather than searching every airline and hotel for prices, picking dates will show options from all those sites at once. Travel sites can be a great place to start looking at travel opportunities because of this search capacity.  Is it safe to use travel sites? If you do find a great deal on an online travel agency, how can you determine if it’s worth it? Utilizing reviews can make you aware of what travel sites might need more looking into. Things like cancellation policies, customer service, and value for your money are all great things to look up reviews about. Even though every customer’s trip and experience is unique, reviews can still be a good indicator of which companies are easy to work with and which are not.  Re:spondelligent has analyzed recent reviews of hotels, restaurants, and campgrounds and found that around 10 percent contain Coronavirus-related feedback. In many reviews, it seems like travelers want to share their experiences to help future travelers choose their vacation accommodations wisely. While you may have to filter through many critical reviews to find the ones with good advice, it might be worth taking note if a site has lots of unhappy customers writing about negative experiences. To find reliable reviews, look to unbiased, third-party review sites. Travel Sites Read travel site reviews from real customers. Learn More

4:30pm - Before leaving the office, I double-check to make sure all my reservations (all booked on Expedia.com) are good to go. Alaska Airlines flight at 7:15 the next morning? Already checked in online and scored a sweet aisle seat by the emergency exits. Enterprise car rental? Check, although I'm hearing foreboding things about San Francisco traffic. Hotel room at Comfort Inn By The Bay? Check. Directions to said hotel? Check. Return flight with Delta? Check. If anything goes wrong, I've purchased a Travel Protection Plan ($50), which sounds reassuring. 5:30pm - I get home from work and start packing for my trip to San Francisco, a video marketing conference I know nothing about. Our six month-old is cranky, with a runny nose. 6:30pm - Everything is packed. The baby is now crying. My wife is trying to console him. 7:30pm - My wife is rubbing her temples. There is talk of a possible migraine. Baby is running a fever. Ibuprofen is administered. Baby goes down. I'm starting to have some doubts about the trip, but as long as my wife's status isn't escalated to 'migraine' I should be good to go. 8:30pm - My wife goes down with a category five migraine. 11:30pm - The baby wakes up, more irate than before. He's running a 102-degree fever. My wife is still down for the count. I'm now the full-time baby care provider, and I start to wonder about flight cancellation and that protection plan. If this situation doesn't change in the next few hours, I'm going to have to find out how that all works. 2:00am - With my wife still out of commission, the baby still running a higher fever, and our other kids about to wake up in just a few hours, I come to the sobering conclusion that I can't leave my household like this. You know, work-life balance and all that. I'll need to cancel the trip. Funny thing is, I'm not exactly sure how to do that. The truth is, Expedia made it incredibly (and frighteningly) easy to plan my trip-so easy, in fact, that I'm not sure how to undo it. Do I do it from their website? Do I call someone? And who should I call: Expedia or the airlines? These questions would be hard enough to answer in broad daylight with a good night's rest, but after very little rest and several hours now of caring for an unhappy infant, these questions seem almost insurmountable. Well, no time like the present to start learning how to cancel a trip on Expedia... Lesson Learned #1: Credits are sorta the nice version of a "no-refund" policy I start with that Alaska Airlines flight because it is obviously at the top of the urgency totem pole. After some waffling, I decide to call Alaska Airlines, instead of Expedia, since the flight is coming up so quickly and I want to make sure I go right to the source. Unfortunately, a quick visit to the Alaska Airlines website tells me their call center doesn't open until 5:00am. I won't be canceling my flight at that exact moment, but I have a few hours to grab some rest, and our sick baby is nice enough to let me doze off. 5:00am - Right around the time I should be arriving at the airport, I wake up and dial their help number. I'm honestly not sure what I'm going to get, based on this cryptic blurb on my Expedia itinerary: "We understand that sometimes plans change. We do not charge a cancel or change fee. When the airline charges such fees in accordance with its own policies, the cost will be passed on to you." ... combined with this message on the Alaska Airlines cancellations web page: "Depending on your fare, there may be a fee to change or cancel your reservation. If a fee does apply, it is $125 (USD) per person, per change, in addition to any difference in fare." It takes only seconds to get a call center rep on the phone, and she is surprisingly cool about the whole cancellation thing, especially since it's literally just a couple hour before my flight is supposed to leave the gate. Even though I was already checked in, my ticket is cancelled and no fee is charged. I breathe a sigh of relief. But she does have a smidgen of bad news. Understandably, it's too late to get a refund. No big surprise there. But I have an ace up my sleeve. Slyly, I tell her that I purchased an Expedia protection plan, not quite sure what I expect her to do with that, like maybe it will grant her the powers to erase the whole situation, like it never happened. To my dismay, the rep doesn't seem to know what to do with this information. "You'll have to talk to Expedia about that," she says. But she does give me a credit with Alaska Airlines to be used within the next 12 months. I start struggling to think up destinations for which I might want to use an $186 credit within the next year. This isn't a bad concession if you're a frequent Alaska Airlines flyer, but I'm not. I can't help but feel that I've been offered the nice version of a "no-refund." But at this time of morning and after the night I've had, I'll take the nice version of bad news over the alternative. Lesson Learned #2: Every airline has its own policies 5:30am - After the sorta embarrassing exchange with the Alaska Airlines rep, I get smart and decide to seek help from the people I booked with: Expedia. It only takes a minute to find their support number, and, after a few seconds of elevator music, I get a rep on the phone named Dan. Struggling to keep all the plotlines straight through a sleep-deprived haze, I explain to Dan my predicament, that I've already cancelled my Alaska Airline flight, that my protection plan bounced right off them like a rubber ball, etc. After asking lots of questions to make sense of my babbling, Dan starts working on canceling my return flight on Delta and puts me on hold while he calls the airline. Elevator music. Then Dan's back, and with good news. He's successfully cancelled with no penalty fee and I get a full refund, but it will take eight weeks for the $505 to show up on the credit card. It's an actual refund this time. I'll take it. Side note: as we go through this process, I start realizing that Dan is pretty much looking at the same information I am looking at in my Expedia itinerary page. So Dan doesn't bring any new information to the table, but he is willing to make the awkward phone calls for me. So I'm willing to let him take the lead. During this process, Dan also points out the differences between Alaska Airlines' and Delta's policies in how they deal with cancellations and probably everything else. These policies show up during the booking process, I think, only to disappear into some some obscure corner of their website in the finest print possible. Keeping all of these straight has got to be a major challenge for frequent travelers. Right up there with trying to prosecute a crime that occurred aboard an airplane as it crossed, like, 18 international boundaries. Lesson Learned #3: You can reserve and cancel car rentals with reckless abandon 5:45am - My cancellation adventure with Dan continues. It's time to try to cancel my rental car reservation with Enterprise. Honestly, at only $38, this reservation has the lowest stakes out of all of the reservations, but every little bit helps. My faithful call-maker Dan has more good news for me. We don't even need to call Enterprise. He proceeds to cancel the reservation from his computer. Done. That's $38 I don't need to worry about. That's when it dawns on me. Compared to all the grief you go through with airline and hotel reservations, you can reserve rental cars with reckless abandon. Until you actually show up at their desk and give them your credit card, they can't charge you for a thing. So far it's my one anchor in this whole cancellation experience-when all else fails, I can cancel a car rental and not worry about losing my shirt. Lesson Learned #4: What did that protection plan cover again? I also have another epiphany in this moment: I have no idea how that "travel protection plan" I paid $50 for affects any of this. It doesn't affect my ability to get refunds, which is clearly determined by company policy. Does it pay for all this great service from Dan? Maybe, although I like to think that Dan would help me regardless. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the travel protection plan is helping me in some way and my sleep-deprived brain just isn't picking it up. Or maybe I'm right and the travel protection plan was just an easy $50 for Expedia. Either way, at no point are the actual benefits of this insurance defined for me. Lesson Learned #5: You can't cancel hotel reservations with reckless abandon 5:55am - Just one more hurdle to go: canceling that reservation with the Comfort Inn By the Bay. I do this with a twinge of sadness. It looked like a great hotel, ideally situated close to all the coolest parts of San Francisco and with an outstanding free breakfast spread of sausages, eggs, etc. After a moment's hesitation, I tell Dan to make the call. Dan calls the Comfort Inn and, for the first time, reports that he's hit a wall. The person working the front desk has informed Dan that only the manager can cancel a reservation and that person won't be in until 10am Pacific. Apparently, there are limits to Expedia's reach across the travel world. Dan advises two courses of action: I can call Expedia at 10am Pacific and have them call the Comfort Inn or I can just call them directly at that time. Thanks to Dan's steady hand, I'm feeling strong enough to just make the call myself, so I accept the task. Just as we bid farewell I almost second-guess my choice and ask Dan if I can have his direct number, but he hangs up before I can say anything. I'm left alone with my choice. 11:00am - After counting down the five hours, the time has finally come. While rocking the still-sick infant, I call Comfort Inn By the Bay to deliver the bad news. The person who picks up the phone sounds out of breath, like I interrupted her refilling of the Belgian waffle maker. I verify that she is the manager and proceed to explain my predicament. Sick baby. Sick wife. Trip nixed. With a marked lack of empathy, she replies, "Oh, no, you can't cancel." "I can't cancel?" I ask. Perhaps I just heard her wrong. "No, we don't take any cancellations within 24 hours of check-in," she responds. My hearing was all too accurate. But there's still a chance... "Well, can I get a refund?" "No." "No refund at all?" I add a heavy dose of incredulity, lest she's turned her attention back to the Belgian waffle maker. "No, not within 24 hours before check-in." She's got that policy down. Shocked pause. "So you'll just take that out of my credit card?" "Yes. You should see it on your account tomorrow morning, because our system updates every night." Stunned, I thank her for the bad news and hang up. I am surprised that, of all the companies I dealt with during this debacle, the hotel is the one least willing to offer some kind of concession, the most strict in terms of penalizing me for canceling. One thing is for certain: canceling hotel reservations and canceling car rentals are two vastly different things. What Expedia Did Right... and Wrong 11:15am - Right around the time when I should've been arriving at the conference, my trip is completely, 100% cancelled. I can't help but reflect on the wins and losses of my experience with Expedia. The travel protection plan still has me perplexed, but Dan's customer service was impeccable. The refunds/credits with both airlines were a welcome surprise, but Comfort Inn was totally inflexible. At the very least, I'll always have that easy car rental cancellation. To see other customer reviews on Expedia and other similar companies, check out our top-rated travel sites today!

When it comes to new technology companies, it's easy to get swept up in the novelty. One favorite object of gushing from the media and online hipsters alike has been booking site Airbnb, which (for the uninitiated out there) allows normal folks ("hosts" per the company's own jargon) to rent out their homes, private rooms, boats, castles, treehouses, and more for short-term use by travelers ("guests"). Hosts can put their digs up on the site and which dates the property is available, and then guests can search the site and get matched with a slew of properties that match their criteria. Photos, descriptions, and reviews from past guests help them pick the right one for their travel plans. Since its inception in 2008, Airbnb has been hailed as a disruptor to the sometimes deceptive and ineffective online hotel booking marketing. It's been listed as one of the next generation of multibillion-dollar startups buy the New York Times. And it has been credited with single-handedly bringing $56 million in tourism dollars to the San Francisco area. They even helped provide free housing to people left homeless by Hurricane Sandy. So with all this praise being bestowed upon Airbnb, what's not to like? With so much going right, there are some things that still go wrong for their customers, hosts and guests alike. Read online review sites about Airbnb and you quickly come across some recurring themes, bad customer experiences that seem to happen again and again. In our research of Airbnb reviews across the Web, these are the seven Airbnb horror stories we noticed were most frightening and most common: 1. Last-Minute "Verification" For the protection of hosts and their property, Airbnb verifies the identities of guest prior to their stays in others' lodgings. Unfortunately, the timing of these verification procedures is often cut uncomfortably close-and sometimes it completely ruins someone's travel plans. One Airbnb review on SiteJabber recalls a situation where this verification came as a complete surprise, and to a guest who had already paid for his stay well in advance: "At the last minute, practically on the eve of my departure, they suspended my account and canceled my paid reservation without explanation. I only found out through a private message from my chosen host as I was packing to leave. When I tried to correct Airbnb over the matter, they demanded a copy of my passport, access to my Facebook and Google accounts, and reconfirmation of my cell number. I didn't want a last-minute derailment of my plans so I unwisely complied. After all that, they wrote that my already 30 days ahead paid reservation was illegitimate and that my account was suspended." To make matters worse, Airbnb's customer service team was less than responsive, and the guest was unable to get a refund from the company for his or her trouble. Sadly, this situation is all too common in Airbnb reviews. Other stories tell of guests, uncomfortable giving up so much of their personal information during the verification process, finally just giving up and booking a hotel to save themselves the trouble and inconvenience. In the end, guests and hosts find the Airbnb verification process to be too much of a burden. 2. Bad Houseguests Airbnb problems don't happen only to guests. Hosts have complained about the lack of protection for their properties from rowdy guests. This review on TrustPilot tells an all-too-common tale: "I rented my cabin through Airbnb last month. My cleaning lady went there to clean it. She texted me right away to alert that the guests smoked weed/marijuana inside the property and the whole house is in a bad condition. We could not rent the place for a few weeks as a result of weed smoking of Airbnb guests who were absolutely disrespectful. I contacted Airbnb to compensate for the damages. Airbnb do not require deposit and guests literally can do what they want." While this does not seem to be the norm with Airbnb, the story was common enough to catch our attention. Other similar stories involve guests who claim to be quiet suburban families but then turn out to be dozens of party-goers who leave meth pipes, trashed houses, and missing items in their wake as evidence of their debauchery. It's worth noting here that Airbnb does offer insurance coverage for this type of craziness, according to their "Host Protection Insurance" page: "If a guest suffers bodily injury or damages property at your building during a stay, Airbnb's Host Protection Insurance program is designed to protect you for covered claims up to $1 million per occurrence." Although this insurance is there to clean up the aftermath, it is clear that many hosts have been miffed by the inability of Airbnb to prevent bad guest behavior in the first place. And it's unclear how easy or difficult it is to qualify for this coverage. 3. Meaningless Reviews When it comes to picking a place to stay in a strange, new place, pretty photos and polished descriptions from a host only mean so much. With guest reviews, on the other hand, the rubber really meets the road. Unfortunately, since guests and hosts can review each other on Airbnb, these reviews tend to be overly positive, to the point of being both unbelievable and frustrating, as explained by Forbes contributor Seth Porges in his article "The Strange Game Theory of Airbnb Reviews": "[I]f one person leaves a negative review on the other, the subject of the review could be annoyed or offended enough to strike back with a negative review of their own. When this system was in place on Airbnb, I would rush to leave a (usually positive, at worst neutral) review as quickly as I could. If I felt that the guest expressed anything other than enthusiastic joy with their experience, I would make doubly sure to leave a review first. The idea being that they would be more likely to deliver a positive review to somebody who had just showered them with praise in a public forum. After all, just as it's tempting to retaliate against somebody who has hurt you, it's human to want to reciprocate niceties." So imagine you're a guest reading reviews to determine the quality of an apartment in New Orleans. Instead of getting the honest reviews you need to make sure you're not signing up for a complete hole, you get a bunch of rosy reviews designed to not incur the wrath of the host. Unless you learn how to read between the lines, you could very well end up in the hole you sought to avoid. Hosts trying to assess the trustworthiness of a guest could similarly find themselves deceived by deceptively favorable reviews. Next thing they know, they're missing a flatscreen television, their drywall has a bunch of holes, and meth pipes are everywhere. 4. No Protection Against Fraud Although Airbnb does offer some protection against bad guests and guest damage, the same can't be said for fraudulent activity against their customers. An alarming number of Airbnb reviews told of email scammers using the company's name to trick customers into giving away critical personal and financial information. According to one such story from the site (I kid you not) AirbnbHell.com, an Airbnb customer received an email with information about an available apartment and inviting him or her to reply if interested. The scammer then walked the customer through a fake process, including convincing him or her to send money to a bank account in Poland. When the customer didn't receive any further information from the fake host, he or she contacted Airbnb customer service and was informed that the email was a fake and that there was little they could do recoup the money lost. It goes without saying here that customers of any online business need to know the warning signs of email fraud. Take note also that Airbnb, like most online businesses, can do little to protect its customers from or prevent this kind of email fraud. The responsibility rests on consumers to be smart about the emails they respond to. 5. Can't Review We've already discussed the Airbnb review system, and how it keeps hosts and guests sort-of honest, but what if a host bails on you at the last minute, leaving you to scramble to find lodging elsewhere? According to Airbnb's system, even though you've just been shafted by a host and your review could be very insightful to future guests, you can't leave a review about the host. Consider this experience from one such unlucky guest, as submitted on AirbnbHell.com: "The host cancelled as we were standing outside trying to check in. My phone pinged with the alert, the host chose to ignore my repeated phone calls and attempts to contact her. Her explanation was a single email stating that she could only accommodate one person and not two but we were renting her whole apartment that is advertised for couples or small families... Airbnb has no legitimate system in place to help travelers when a host doesn't honor their commitment. And they don't allow you to review the host if you didn't actually stay at their place, so their star rating and reviews mean nothing. Never rent from Phoebe Fleming at 63 Melcher St., Boston, MA, and probably don't ever book a trip with Airbnb that you aren't prepared to have go totally awry!" 6. Trouble Getting Refunds You'd think that, with such a high propensity for cancelled stays on the part of hosts and guests, Airbnb would have a pretty streamlined system for issuing refunds. If reviews are to be believed, alas, such is not the case. Review after review complains about difficulty getting refunds after a failed stay. The lucky ones seem to be those who can at least secure a partial refund. One horror story told of a couple who found their host AWOL, the apartment they'd rented occupied inexplicably by two students, and the apartment in poor shape (think no electricity in some rooms and bad odors), all of which was enough to drive the couple out after one night when they'd paid for four: "We tried to get a refund from Alan (the host) but no joy. Airbnb got involved - still no refund though Airbnb gave us a token £27 refund (we paid £217 in total). This was the worst night we have ever had anywhere and our advice is not to touch Airbnb." 7. Shabby Safety Features When it comes to safety, staying in a hotel or resort is one thing. These forms of lodging usually come equipped with smoke detectors, security staff, etc. But what about when you're essentially just crashing at someone's house? To be fair, Airbnb does strongly encourage their hosts to make their abodes as safe as possible for their guests. A message on their "Responsible Hosting" page reads: "We encourage hosts to think carefully about their responsibilities. Hosting offers rich experiences, but it comes with a certain level of commitment." The page goes onto to offer a toll-free hotline for neighbors of hosts and recommend providing emergency numbers, first aid kits, smoke detectors, etc. But these are just that: recommendations. Not requirements. This can result in some dicey situations for guests. One review submitted with the Better Business Bureau (BBB) told of guests awoken in the middle of the night to find a fire consuming the third floor of the apartment building they were staying in: "At no point did a fire alarm or any sort of smoke detector alert us. It was only by the simple grace that one of my family members happened to be awake at 3am and noticed something." Especially when booking through Airbnb in other countries, guests should understand the risks involved. Their lodging might have few to no safety features. Is Airbnb worth it? Lower cost is usually what draws travelers to Airbnb, as opposed to Expedia or Travelocity. With that lower cost, however, seems to come a higher level of risk. It's not that can't have a terrible experience booking through Hotels.com-my own personal experience with a Tempe extended stay and a crack pipe proves as much. But Airbnb, for all its innovation and ingenuity, seems to be behind the game when it comes to customer service and contingencies. To be absolutely fair, Airbnb has an A+ rating with the BBB. They are loved by most of their customers and media folks alike. A relatively small number of online reviews don't necessarily reflect the experiences of all customers. But any customers or potential Airbnb customers need to understand what exactly comes with their Airbnb reservation, the good, the annoying, and the potentially hazardous. See how we, here at bestcompany.com, and our users rated Airbnb here!