Vacation Booking Sites

The most popular vacation booking sites, like Orbitz and Expedia, provide the comprehensive tools and advice needed to book a hotel or a flight.

However, if you’re looking for the perfect vacation rental or want to plan a multi-destination trip abroad, you’ll need to look elsewhere.

Here are some of the best vacation booking sites for planning your next trip:

Sites for vacation rentals, like Airbnb and HomeAway. Both provide an easy way to search for vacation homes, apartments and condos in destinations across the world.

Sites for last-minute trips, like Hotwire and Priceline. Want to get away from it all this weekend? These sites can help you find that perfect last-minute deal — even at the airport.

Sites for air travel deals, like Kayak and Skyscanner. These sites find the lowest fares on flights worldwide by searching hundreds of other travel sites at once.

Sites for cruises and other package trips, like Cruise Critic and Gate 1 Travel. If you’re looking to take an extended cruise or guided tour abroad, these sites have great tools and reviews to help you decide where to go and how to book it.

The world’s largest search engine wants to be your one-stop shop for all things travel. Google Flights has added a number of new features in the past year that make it easier to find vacation deals, including a “featured deals” section with special prices on hotels and flights.

The only catch is that you will have to book your flight and hotel together, as Google isn’t offering standalone hotel bookings just yet.

Looking for a hotel, flight or rental car? You can find it all online, but once you do, it can be a challenge to book it. 

A lot of websites will find you the best deals, but they’re not always so good at actually allowing you to book them. There are a variety of reasons for this and ways around it.

Hotels: When you search for a hotel room on sites like Hotels.com, Expedia or Travelocity, you’ll often get one price on their site and another when you click through to the hotel site itself. The hotel’s website may end up being cheaper because it doesn’t have to share its profits with a third-party booking site. 

Also, keep in mind that booking direct may give you access to special rates and promotions that the other sites won’t have.

Flights: This can be a bit more complicated. When shopping for flights online, your results may vary based on your location and which browser you’re using because travel sites want to track if you’ve visited before and what kind of prices you’ve been seeing so they can adjust theirs accordingly.

Orbitz

Orbitz.com is a travel fare aggregator website and travel metasearch engine. The website is owned by Orbitz Worldwide, Inc., a subsidiary of Expedia Group. The website can be used to book airline tickets, hotel reservations, car rentals, cruises and vacation packages.

Orbitz.com has been recognized as a leading online travel agency by the likes of J.D. Power and Associates, PC Magazine, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Magazine, Travel + Leisure Magazine, Smart Money Magazine and Consumer Reports.

Trivago

Trivago is a travel search engine for hotels, vacation rentals, flights, and more. When you search for hotels on trivago, you can filter by cost per night, star rating, amenities, hotel brand, or hotel class. You can also sort your results based on popularity, price, distance from the city center, the number of reviews, or the best match for you.

Trivago is available in over 50 countries and 33 languages!

TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor is the world’s largest travel site, providing trusted advice from real travelers and a wide variety of travel choices and planning features with seamless links to booking tools. 

Since launching in 2000, TripAdvisor has grown into one of the world’s largest travel sites, with more than 315 million monthly visitors and over 125 million reviews and opinions covering more than 4.5 million accommodations, restaurants and attractions.

The sites operate in 45 countries worldwide, including China under daodao.com. TripAdvisor also includes TripAdvisor for Business, a dedicated division that provides the tourism industry access to millions of monthly TripAdvisor visitors.

Booking

Booking.com is a travel fare aggregator website and travel metasearch engine for lodging reservations of Dutch origin. Since 2005, it has been owned and operated by United States-based Booking Holdings.

Originally established and headquartered in Amsterdam, the company has since been consolidated into Booking Holdings’ headquarters in Norwalk, Connecticut, United States. As of 2018, its operations are available in 43 languages.

The site is available in about 240 countries and territories worldwide1 and over 1.5 million room nights are reserved on the site each day.