How To Find Great Travel Deals Online

Love to travel, but on a budget? There are ways you can scratch the travel itch without breaking the bank.  All you need is a little patience, a computer, a little creativity, and a credit card, and before you know it, you'll be sipping margaritas in Mexico or catching a big wave in Hawaii.  In this economy, every little bit helps, and there are some great travel deals to be found online.

If you know where you want to stay, check out Raveable, a hotel review site that helps you compare the lowest prices offered by many of the major travel sites, like Orbitz and Hotels.com.  Just plug in the dates and the name of the hotel, and Raveable does the work of searching all the major sites to help you find the lowest price.  After you select the hotel or location, Raveable opens separate windows for each of the top travel sites so you can compare.  It saves you the trouble of searching each of the sites individually, while letting you see what they have to offer.  

Searching for a cheap airfare? TripMama has a similar functionality, allowing you to choose up to 3 sites to search and compare, including Orbitz, Kayak, and Expedia.  

Of the travel aggregator sites, I like CheapOair's 4-pronged guarantee to go with its promise of low fares:

1. The lowest airfare and hotel prices
2. 1 million discounted airfares and 100,000 discounted hotel rates
3. Great customer service
4. Up to $25 inconvenience coupon applied to every fare. 

For a business trip from San Francisco to DC, I checked out fares using TripMama, and found CheapOair's to be $90 less than what Orbitz and Expedia were offering for the same timeframe.

If you're not picky about where you stay or how you get there, check out Hotwire.  For airfare, you plug in the dates and locations, and the site finds the lowest fare.  The catch is that you don't see the airlines you'll be traveling on until after you purchase the fare.  

For hotels, you check off the location and level of accommodations based on star ratings from one (budget hotel) to five (luxury hotel), and the site gives you rates for your selected area.  Again, you don't know the name of the hotel until after you purchase, but if you've been researching hotels in the area, you can come up with a pretty good guess based on the description and price.

Traveling from San Francisco to New York, I had a long layover in Chicago and needed a hotel near O'Hare to catch an early morning flight.  I wanted to stay at the Hilton Hotel at O'Hare, but the published price on the major travel sites and the hotel site was over $200.  I plugged in the particulars into Hotwire, and ended up getting the same hotel for $89.   If you don't have your heart set on a particular place, but location is key, Hotwire will find the best deal.  I've used Hotwire for years, and had great success with the hotel function.
If you're loyal to a particular hotel or airline or travel site, be sure to subscribe to their online newsletters for last-minute deals.  I like the Quikbook newsletter, which offers tempting deals on hotel rooms that you might not find elsewhere.  They tend to offer smaller, boutique hotels that aren't necessarily on the radar of the larger travel search sites.

Don't know where you want to go or when?  Check out the gorgeous, inspiring Jetsetter, offering short-term sales on luxury vacation spots around the globe.  It's an "invitation-only" site, so you have to sign up to receive their exclusive offerings. Recent listings included a golf vacation in Morroco, romantic villas in Bali, and surfing lessons in Costa Rica.   The photos alone make you want to pack up and hit the road.  Almost all of the accommodations are 30-50% off the list price for the same hotel or trip, but you have to be ready to go within a month or so.  What are you waiting for? Get packing!  The world awaits you...

What are some of your favorite ways to save on travel?  What are your favorite travel planning sites?

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Clever Girls Collective is a social media marketing agency founded by women who wanted to use their deep marketing experience and broad social network relationships for good. We know that women who engage in social media are some of the most authentic, connected, trusted, and vocal influencers -- not only online, but "in real life." That's why we've developed The Clever 1000: an ever-growing, beautifully diverse network of professional, thoughtful social media-connected, natural networkers and influencers who want to engage with and enhance their favorite brands. Glennia Campbell is a lawyer, writer, photographer, traveler and mother from Palo Alto, California.  Her family has traveled the globe since her son (now 10) was six weeks old.  They have journied to twenty-five countries together, hitting such hotspots as Greenland, the Galapagos, Easter Island, and Libya.  She writes about her family's adventures, both foreign and domestic, at her blog, The Silent I.  She is a co-founder of the progressive women's blog, MOMocrats, and a contributor to the Korean-American parenting blog, Kimchi Mamas.  You can follow her on Twitter @glennia for random rants and insights on travel, politics, reality tv, and parenting.