Consumers no longer need travel agents to find the best travel deals and options. In our tests it also did the best job of showing a variety of special rates—including discounts for eligible groups (AAA members, senior citizens ), credit card deals, and time-sensitive offers from the hotel—and offered specially negotiated rates with many properties.
What’s worse, if your credit card charges you a fee (typically 1{ec368f71a1d7f6e550809f248b827a892feef3d52af01b30b03fed349049d4e5} of the bill) for currency conversion, your credit card company will likely still require you to pay the currency-conversion charge – even if the hotel has done its own currency conversion.
In the USA, for instance, the American Automobile Association (AAA) website offers visitors a comprehensive travel service for road trips across the country; it recently became the first online travel planner to list local gas stations in America – and it is additions like these that prove how important information on travel sites can be to prospective holidaymakers.
Forbes Travel Guide uses a proprietary list of up to 800 objective standards to answer that question and assess hotels, restaurants and spas in 29 countries across the globe to see how they measure up. Formerly known as the Mobil Travel Guide, Forbes sends undercover agents into the field to evaluate properties from virtually every angle, from the customer service to the room service to the fitness facilities.
Why they love it: The new online travel magazine from travel photographer Annapurna Mellor and her writer sister Athena has inspired trips to a little-visited town in Egypt on the border of Libya, an open-air laundry in the slums of Mumbai, and the streets of a provincial town in Western Russia.