Top 10 business-travel websites
By Susan Spano, Entrepreneur.com, in GlobeandMail.com
The Internet is everyone's travel agent, and how good your “agent” is depends on your knowing the best sites that will give you great deals, accurate glimpses of your destination and warnings about the inevitable glitches you'll encounter along the way. The best travel sites do all of that and more:
This puppy hooks you into time-sensitive airline deals too difficult to track on your own. But unlike other airfare search engines, Airfarewatchdog tracks Southwest and JetBlue airlines, cherry-picks from airline websites (which increasingly offer the best buys) and makes sure seats are actually available for the deals they post. Plus, the site's got a great mascot – founder George Hobica's wheaten terrier, Browser. P.S., the site's Twitter feed offers low-fare alerts and prompt answers to questions.
The corporate hatchet man in Up in the Air spent most of his life on the road but never seemed to suffer for it. Of course, he was played by George Clooney. Regular business travellers lose sleep and their cutting edge. I've been through Ambien and melatonin. The best cure I know is CBT for Insomnia, a cognitive behavioural therapy program devised by Harvard Medical School researcher Dr. Gregg Jacobs that you can complete online in five sessions for $29.95.
This new site is the insider's choice for snagging bargain hotel rooms in North America, Mexico and the Caribbean. Free to users, it covers offers from hotel sites, e-mail newsletters, rewards programs and many other sources, taking you straight to the right website for booking once you find the deal you want. Transparency is the site's best feature. You can see right away where the deal comes from, what's required and how much you save (as a percentage of regular rates, not artificially inflated rack rates).
FlightView isn't just a way to find out whether Aunt Bertha's plane from Saskatchewan is going to arrive on time (though it does that better than most airline websites). By providing real-time, state-of-the art information about the status of in-progress flights, it also has become an important tool for government agencies and private businesses that rely on commercial airlines. Check it out the next time Auntie B comes to town.
Since its launch in 2004, Kayak has become the most popular all-around travel site, not least because it's supported by advertising so there's no cost to users. It's a true search engine, not an Internet travel agency. Once you find the flight, hotel, rental car, travel package or cruise you want, you have to go to the source to make a booking.
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