My girlfriend and I are planning a trip to Northern California in mid-September for some hiking in King’s Canyon/Sequoia National Park. We’re planning on flying into San Francisco and renting a car.
Does anybody have any experiences they could share (good, bad or indifferent) to discount travel sites like CheapTrips.com ? Too good to be true? Comparable sites you’ve encountered for good or ill?
Any recommendations, thoughts or experiences would be most appreciated.
Sites like that are generally quick and affordable, but most of the time you can get the trip cheaper if you book separately (in my experience at least.) Also, DO NOT under any circumstances book a hotel room without reading reviews by people who have stayed there. For example, I love the Americana Inn in NYC. It is cheap, located in times square and clean. I looked at other hotels in the same price range that had much larger rooms or private baths or whatever and every review stated that they got bedbugs from the hotels. I will put up with a smaller room or a shared bath to get the low price without the bedbugs.
If you’re going all the way down to Sequoia/King’s Canyon, then have you looked into flying into Fresno/Yosemite Airport instead? Several major airports from roughly Chicago westward have direct service there now, there’s not much difference in the airfare (depending on when you fly), and it’s a lot closer drive from there to the parks…roughly 1.5 hours as opposed to 5-6 hours from SFO, depending on traffic heading out of the Bay Area. I know that hotels around Sequoia are not as abundant as near Yosemite, so Fresno might not be a terrible place to look for a hotel, either (unless you can find a good one in a place like Visalia or Three Rivers).
(P.S. - have a great time and don’t miss the General Sherman !)
I’m pricing out a trip right now and have been hitting all the big travel sites (expedia, orbitz, priceline, travelocity and budgettravel dot coms).
I got my best flight priced on the SW airline website- they had an internet special! Try:
AirTran Airways
Allegiant Air
ATA Airlines
Frontier Airlines
go!
JetBlue Airways
Primaris Airlines
Skybus Airlines
SkyValue
Southwest Airlines
Spirit Airlines
Sun Country Airlines
USA 3000 Airlines
US Airways
Virgin America
One of them had a ten dollar special (Skyvalue?), but does not travel in my area.
Whenever possible, book directly through the airline. If you book through the airline and anything goes wrong (delayed, canceled, missed connection, whatever), you deal with the airline when going for compensation and/or rebooking. If you go through a third party (ie, cheaptrips.com) then you may or may not get shuttled between the two if making any complaints. It introduces a third party and that complicates things.
On the other hand, if it’s a simple direct flight from A to B, you’d probably be just fine with a third party.
And on yet another hand, sometimes (as mentioned) you can get cheaper deals direct through an airline. Some of the sites don’t search all the airlines.