Apps That Can Help You Save Money On Travel
The most frequent question I hear from friends is, “How can I get to XXX really cheaply?” Fill in the blank with your preferred destination, and you have the question I get just about every day. There are so many different answers to that question. Where do we start?
Money magazine recently featured me in an article about the best apps to help save money when you travel. Lisa Marie Segarra and I spoke about a ton of different travel apps. Here are a few that we went over that I like the most:
Hotel Tonight: They’re business is entirely app-driven and focuses on short-term hotel bookings. While you can book for more than just tonight, they really focus on rooms within the next few days.
Here’s my bonus tip on Hotel Tonight. I’ve occasionally found a cheap hotel on Hotel Tonight that I want to stay at. In those cases, I’ve been fairly successful calling the hotel directly and asking if they can provide me a similar rate and still use my elite benefits by booking directly.
Stay At Hand: You can find their desktop version at stayfaster.com and their app on the iOS app store. What I like here is that the app has a similar format to Hotel Tonight for finding short-term (or longer term) bookings, but the vast majority of their rates will allow you to earn loyalty points and receive your elite status benefits.
The Hopper app that fellow blogger Chris McGinnis mentioned isn’t one I was initially familiar with. But, now that I’ve read about it, I’ve downloaded the app. I’ll get back to everyone on what I think after I play with it a bit.
I also covered Turo and SpotHero for car travel. I plan to write-up SpotHero in a future post, but it’s my go-to parking app.
The Final Two Pennies
I always enjoy talking about how to save money on travel. Getting to chat apps with the folks at Money was a good reminder for me of all the great ways to save money. And, thanks to Chris, I’ve picked up a new app to test!
Thanks for the suggestions. I hadn’t heard of Spot Hero, Stay At Hand, or The Hopper before.
Spot Hero rocks. I kinda broke Stay At Hand. More on that soon.
Yeah, was having trouble downloading SAH
You’ll laugh when you hear the story.
I travel so rarely that I don’t even think of hotels or car rentals. I still end up just visiting “friends,” which is nice, but also limiting. I realize reading this list that I find all of this simply overwhelming. I am not even sure where to start. Perhaps first should pick a location. 🙂
Nensi, you hit the nail on the head! The best thing to do is start with a goal? Where do you want to go? What kind of trip do you want to take? Business class? Luxury hotel, budget hotel? Once you start putting those answers together, figuring out how to save money can fill in the blanks.