Family Travel Resources
The family travel resources listed below are our go-to websites for planning and booking our trips. As always, when booking travel it pays to shop around, and these companies should be your starting point for finding the very best deals available on accommodation, flights and car hire. They are the best resources out there, continually offering the best deals.
Accommodation
Booking.com have the biggest selection of accommodations online – and a good mix of hotels, appartments and pretty much any other accommodation type you can think of. They also tend to have the same or better prices than anyone else, and most bookings have free cancellations until close to the stay date.
We use Airbnb a lot – up there with Booking.com. As a family, Airbnb often have useful alternatives to the more expensive family rooms in hotels, in the form of flats, appartments and holiday homes. You do need to watch out for the “fees” that are added on at the end of the booking however!
ebookers are a European online travel agency that are part of the US giant Expedia. This means they have all of Expedia’s US accommodation (at the same rates as Expedia), but they also run one of the best loyalty schemes out there – Bonus+, where you can earn cash to deduct from future bookings.
Hostelworld are far and away is the biggest website for booking hostels… and hostels can be pretty cool, sometimes!
Part of the Booking.com family, with a focus on Asia. Agoda have great inventory and ofter the best rates for accommodation in Asia – and loads of very useful customer reviews.
Flights
Our advice is to always start your flight search using a flight comparison website. There are loads out there, but we’ve found these three to be the best for coverage and price. Given how expensive flying for a family of four can be we’ll often use all three comparison site, to make sure we’ve nailing down the very best price we can. Check out our guide to finding cheap flights.
The daddy of flight comparison websites, with a massive range of airlines and detinations, and a very intuitive interface to use. Skyscanner also have the epic “search everywhere” for a given month to pull back all rates for every country. We’ve ended up booking a fmaily holiday destination off the back of these results several times after finding flight bargains for the four of us!
Google Flights are relativley new to the flight search and booking game, but seem to be improving all the time. If you’re flexible on where you want to go (random city break?) they have a pretty cool map feature that let’s you look at all flights into or out of a given desitnation.
Momondo seem to do a good job at comparing some more obscure airlines that Skyscanner sometimes misses. They also have some great serarch functionality that includes how many cabin bags you need, and what card type you’re paying with, to make the prices displayed a true reflection of the price you’ll end up paying.
Getting Around
TravelSupermarket is a price comparison site for all sorts of travel, but seems to excel at surfacing great car hire prices. Always worth checking them out when hiring a car.
The Man in Seat 61 is a labour of love, explaining how to travel comfortably & affordably by train or ferry where you might think air is the only option.
Guide Books
Rough Guides A great guide when you are on the road. You can buy the books digital, or even just the chapters you will be using. We use them all the time, but just as a guideline.
Lonely Planet are a great guide when you are on the road. You can buy the books digital, or even just the chapters you will be using. We use them all the time, but just as a guideline.
DK Travel are a great guide when you are on the road. You can buy the books digital, or even just the chapters you will be using. We use them all the time, but just as a guideline.
Disclosure: Please note that some of the above links are affiliate links, meaning that we earn a small commission if you make a purchase, at no additional cost to you. We use all the companies listed here and recommend them because they are the best travel websites out there.