recommendations
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Quick Cheat Sheet:
Travel Insurance: SafetyWing
Guided Tours: GetYourGuide
Flights: Google Flights & Faredrop
Hotels: Hilton Hotels or Booking.com
Rental Cars: Discover Cars
We have been using SafetyWing for all our health insurance (including COVID) and travel insurance needs! Check out our full breakdown on what to look for in travel insurance below!
If you are planning on doing any sort of traveling, ensuring you make the most of the points you earn is important. We have all our favorite travel credit cards and travel hacking tips here for you!
Saving money before we started traveling has allowed us to travel for over 3 years without making any money! Read all about our saving tips and favorite travel savings accounts.
Budgeting before and during your travels is important. We have plenty of tips on how to stay organized and how to stick to your budget while traveling the world.
I am a huge organizational nerd so I have fine-tuned our travel templates a ton over the years. And now I want to give them to you! FOR FREE! Sign up for our weekly Newsletter and get access to all our travel freebies!
flights
We use Google Flights 90% of the time. They have a great aggregate of the top budget airlines around the world and offer easy ways to search for the best dates. We often use the Explore feature to find the best deals on flights around a certain date or time frame. Pro Tip: only use in Private Browser to keep prices low!
We started using FareDrop to help us find awesome deals on flights all around the world. This site is especially helpful if you have a lot of flexibility when you travel. They find crazy deals sometimes up to 80% off normal prices. We have the Business Plan so they search for great deals on Business Class flights too!
accommodations
When we are looking for hotels or have a short stay, we always look for our hotels on Booking.com. I personally love the filters available (private bathroom, 9 stars) and the map is always easy to use. Genius Level 2 has gotten us tons of discounts, free upgrades, and complimentary breakfast.
We are Hilton loyal, although we might be biased (we used to work for Hilton). Since we stay at a lot of Hiltons throughout the year, we use our points a lot. The best way to book Hilton hotels is always direct with their price match guarantee and you always get points to use on future free stays!
Misc. travel
We don’t book a lot of excursions with guides or tours but when we do, we try to always go through Get Your Guide. They have a large selection of options and a great user interface to make it easy to find what you’re looking for. They also have a great refund policy and customer service!
Road trips are our favorite way to explore a new country. We recently found Discover Cars and it has been a GAME CHANGER. They have the best prices, a huge selection, reviews of the rental companies, and a comprehensive insurance plan. We’ve used them multiple times now and they are my go-to for car rentals
Having data while traveling is super important for us. We use Google Maps, Google Translate, call ride shares, and are constantly searching for more information. Airalo allows us to purchase e-sims before we even arrive in the country so we have data the second we land.
We don’t book a lot of excursions with guides or tours but when we do, we try to always go through Get Your Guide. They have a large selection of options and a great user interface to make it easy to find what you’re looking for. They also have a great refund policy and customer service!
12Go.asia has a huge selection of transportation options. They are adding thousands of routes every single month. It’s not only Asia either. We love booking with them because booking in person can be really difficult in some countries and you can use credit cards (more points!).
Staying safe online is probably not the first thing you are thinking of when getting ready for a trip, but using public wi-fi while traveling makes it even easier for hackers to get your information. Downloading the Surfshark VPN (Virtual Private Network) encrypts your data keeping you safe and even allows you to change your location to make it easier to access the content you want from all over the world.
Over the years, my travel planning process has been refined and improved (a lot). These are now all the apps and websites I use on a weekly basis to plan all of our travels. They are all FREE and easy to use.
Notion is my go-to for all things travel, work, and personal. This free app makes it easy to organize your life in one place. Check out our free Notion travel templates to see how we use it for travel!
App in the Air is a great flight tracking app. I add all of our flights to the app and it keeps us updated on delays or changes in the gate. It also keeps a record of how many miles we’ve flown, which is a fun stat for us to see!
Once I start the planning process, I jump into Google Maps. I have a saved list for each destination and from there I will save all the locations for our trip. I save restaurants, tourist attractions, hotels, airports, parks, and more!