Travelocity

When searching for airline tickets through Travelocity, you'll get the most important details in the first search, and then you can refine your search through the results page. All your recent searches are saved for easy access, a great feature if you travel to a destination frequently for work, family visits or vacations. When you book flights, the results page shows a range of prices next to each airline if you have a preference. The flights on the results page are sorted with the best deal at the top, but you can sort your search by departure or

arrival times, airline, the number of transfer stops and flight duration. If you're determined to hunt around for the best price, you can compare rates for the same routes with other sites directly from Travelocity.

 

The fewer searches you conduct for the ideal hotel, the better. The hotel search on Travelocity is apt at narrowing your results. From the initial home page search, you can filter hotels by class and accommodation types beyond hotels. You can search for bed and breakfasts, apartments, condos and all-inclusive resorts. This is a great feature if you're looking for special kinds of travel, like a honeymoon or a family trip.

Travelocity gives you plenty of information to help you judge the quality and suitability of a hotel. Small alerts appear next to popular hotels if other customers frequently book it within 48 hours of their trip. You'll also get further validation on a hotel's quality with the TripAdvisor guest reviews posted on each hotel profile. These reviews come from previous guests and cover the ins and outs of a hotel that other travel sites typically don't mention. Details about rooms list the number of beds, the smoking status and cancellation status, so you'll know in advance about any fees if your plans fall through.

 

Travelocity isn't limited to flights and hotels. You can book rental cars, cruises and activities on this online travel site as well. Rental cars come with a "book now, pay later" policy in case plans change. If you book a cruise, you can catch special deals for seniors or previous passengers, and you'll find some deals if you're a qualifying member of the military or a union.

A vacation won't be restful if you're stuck in a ticket line. You can book activities, attractions and services around the world to make your travel smoother. These include things like airport parking or shuttles, theater tickets, theme park tickets, sightseeing tours and excursions, to name a few. You can also book package deals through Travelocity if you want to make reservations for hotels, flights and cars all at once to save more money.

Travelocity is one of the best online travel agencies to make fast reservations in only a few clicks. The package deals are especially useful if you're planning a longer trip or need multiple reservations. If you opt for a travel package, Travelocity will walk you through each reservation so you don't have to book anything individually. The initial search specifications 

for all booking are detailed enough to reduce the number of overall searches, so you can find exactly what you want in only a few clicks. However, there could be small improvements, like the addition of flexible date searches to look for available reservations three days before or after your searched date.

 

The search features can improve your booking experience. For example, if you want to stay near Universal Studios on your vacation to Orlando, you can enter points of interests, use specific addresses or search the entire city for the best place to stay. The predictive text when searching for a hotel also provides you with other points of interest and available hotels nearby. Although you can't sort hotels by chain, you can enter the name of your preferred hotel into the homepage search so only that chain will populate in your results. If you need to refine your results, the page will refresh automatically and show your new search results.

Travelocity is one of only two sites we reviewed with all the extras we look for, including rewards programs. Unlike the other travel websites, Travelocity's rewards program is based on 

an American Express card. When you sign up for this rewards card, you'll get bonus points for your very first purchase and all others within the first three months of being a cardholder. After that, every dollar you spend with the card on Travelocity will earn you one dollar. There's no annual fee for this service, and you'll receive money back for earning 5,000 points or more. While this is only for purchases on Travelocity, it's a great way to get a return on your purchases for future travel.

 

Regardless of where or how often you fly, you can manage your itinerary from Travelocity on the website or through the mobile app. The app works for all the popular platforms such as iPad, iPhone, Android, Kindle Fire and non-touch devices like BlackBerry. When you book through the app, you'll get access to Travelocity's top-secret hotels, extra notifications about deals and updates about flight delays, changes or severe weather.

Although Travelocity lacks live chat, you'll still find plenty of methods to get the help you need and your questions answered. This travel website is one of the few we saw with email support. While Travelocity's phone support is helpful, email is great for less pressing questions. The searchable FAQs section provides answers to the most popular questions. Unlike other online travel agencies, the FAQs section on Travelocity isn't sorted by topic. Instead, you can type full questions or keywords related to your question. A unique feature to Travelocity's support is the trip advisories within the FAQs section. This notifies you of any social or environmental factors that may impact travel to an area, such as pilot strikes, social unrest, national travel policy changes or weather conditions. These advisories won't always apply to your plans, but they're good to know if you're traveling internationally or have transfers in any affected areas.

While it's easy to find a plethora of hotels, flight options and customized booking for almost any location on the globe, and frequent flyers will benefit from Travelocity the most. Features like the rewards program through American Express, global updates and the mobile app make this a great travel site. We found that Travelocity's prices were higher than the other online travel agencies we tested, but you'll find a near limitless selection.