The Best Travel Sites

With the economy sour, and a plethora of Web sites out there promising the best value for your travel dollar, which sites sort through the clutter and save you money? Here are some of my favorites:

Kayak.com - The now eponymous site compares some of the more popular Internet web properties and compares the prices for you in one central interface, saving you the time and effort of visiting the different sites themselves. Kayak is useful in a few ways depending on the type of travel-related booking you are looking for. For airlines, it allows you a lot of filtering options to see the best priced based on the time you want to travel, nearby airports, stops, etc. Most airline Web sites have a best-price guarantee so if you know you want to fly, say, American, just visit their Web site, but if you want to compare conveniences, Kayak is the way to go.

Kayak is probably most useful in saving money on hotels. With a much less standard rate system, culling the various sites is more useful than airlines for a price comparison. Its also helpful for a city like New York with tons of hotels to have maping features. You can also save big bucks on rental cars with Kayak.

Travelzoo - Travelzoo's interface sucks and I'm not a huge fan of its search functionality. But the Weekly Top Twently list is amazing. Mailed out Wednesdays, it contains 20 of the best travel deals around the country - you can't really target to your preferred destination but give it time and eventually you'll strike gold.

Hotwire - Hotwire is pretty much the same thing as priceline, except it seems slightly less... sketchy. Hotwire is different because it gives you the price up front, it just doesn't tell you the airline or name of the hotel. I do like the interface on the hotel side, where you can search by area and star level. Frequently, if you know the area well enough you can get a pretty good guess as to where you're staying before you committ.

Priceline - Anyone who has used priceline frequently enough has a horror story. You really have to think and consider all eventualities before booking, but if you can truly be flexible, you can save oodles of cash. I like priceline best for hotels, sometimes you can get a better rate with a similar arrangement than you can on Hotwire. BE WARNED though, even though the rooms are technically double occupancy, if you're in a place like NYC where the average hotel room is the size of a shoe box, you shouldn't plan on being able to get two beds or shacking up with 15 of your closest friends. When booking airline tickets, BE WARNED, the VAST majority of priceline tickets booked are on VERY early flights out of the airport. If you can't fly out at 6am, don't book on Priceline.