TRAVEL RESOURCES
Whether you are a travel blogger, a digital nomad or a backpacker, you need the best tools to make your life easier. I've made a list of the best tools on the market which personally use and trust.
BOOKING FLIGHTS
It’s a travel agency that’s been working globally since 2003 for a motive, to provide travellers with the best suitable flights for almost everywhere in the world. With other attributes and features, Skyscanner is the most trustable and it suggests only the best rated flights. Furthermore, there are reviews of previous bookers, which are helpful to find out the quality of the service provided by the airline. Plus, in case of constant negative ratings, the airline is usually removed from the website, which means only the most reliable flights are suggested by the Skyscanner.
KAYAK
Among the flight bookings sites, Kayak.com is one of the oldest and best international travel sites. It provides the best, cheapest and fastest airline bookings along with the suggestion of best-suited routes and flights. Moreover, Kayak.com displays the price trends for the past years helping you to find out the best and cheapest time to book flights. Kayak.com provides these services for free, the prices for flights listed on the website are the actual prices set by the airlines. Kayak.com is popular for the best and cheap flight bookings.
Kiwi is another amazing travel service working globally and providing travellers from all across the world with the best flight bookings for their routes. Kiwi serves 24/7 in 13 different languages, making it easier for travellers to query or complain. KIWI is built on the idea of “connection”. It suggests multiple routes and connections for a journey, as well as protects you from any unexpected delay or cancellation of flight by airlines during layover time and provides you with an alternative. Kiwi is the best choice if you want to make a trip to multiple destinations.
travel insurance
Safetywing provides with some of the best products and policies in terms of travel insurance. It has introduced different medical insurances according to the nature of travel. Nomad insurance policy is for the travelers who are already working abroad, and it covers home trip as well. Remote health policy grants global companies (for their employees), remote entrepreneurs and individuals to get insured for the entire trip and almost everywhere in the world. Besides, there is an upcoming policy of Remote Doctor, which provides doctor’s consultation during the trip at reasonable prices. Check our full SAFETYWING REVIEW
For the residents of United Kingdom, Guernsey, Isle of Man and Jersey, the True Traveller would be the best choice for travel insurance. True Traveller serves with 3 policies: True value, Traveller, and Traveller plus, in which the most popular policy is Traveller because of its fair prices and best cover. However, there are some extra advantages of Traveller plus policy such as providing with cover for high-risk activities. True Traveller also grants you the option to disable the claim’s excess, so you won’t have to pay deductible amount while claiming.
Easy to acquire from anywhere in the world, World Nomads provides with 2 policies: standard and explorer. There is a slight difference of expenses and covers between both policies. Whether you are already abroad or just about to leave for a trip you can get insured by just filling a simple form on worldnomads.com. Emergency medical expenses, medical transport, emergency dental treatment, out of budget expenses in hospital and much more are included in the insurance. Furthermore, if any injury or medical illness occurs during the trip, the insurance will remain valid for up to 12 months to cover up the expenses. However, there are some exclusions for specific circumstances. Check our full WORLDNOMADS REVIEW
BOOKING ACCOMMODATION
When it comes to booking accommodation, Booking.com leads with a huge margin. It’s the most popular, trustable and one of the oldest accommodations booking agencies in the world. Booking.com works in 43 different languages and offer more than 28 million accommodations. Booking.com also comes up with the offer for separate homes and apartments for long stays. Plus, the ratings and reviews for each accommodation are mentioned, so you can get to know what others think.
Another amazing search engine for accommodation and hotels/resorts booking site is Agoda.com. It has 3 different search categories. For short trips, it provides with the best available ordinary and luxury hotels. If you want to book a private accommodation you may search through “private stays” tab. Beside these 2 searches, Agoda.com launched a new search category for long stays, especially for those who travel for business and have to stay a bit longer. Agoda.com prepares a list for best suited accommodations at cheaper prices than casual hotels for monthly stays. It also provides accommodation in remote areas.
Hotels.com stands among the top booking sites and helps travellers finding and booking the best-suited accommodation for their trip. What makes hotels.com exceptional is its offers and rewards. The bookers simply can become a member by signing up and get membership advantages. All you need to do is to book a hotel room via hotels.com, and after check-in, you need to collect a stamp for each night in your account, and once you collected 10 stamps you will get “reward night”, each stamp worth the price of a night stay. The reward will be the average value of 10 stamps. There is also level upgradation with collection of certain number of stamps, and with each upgradation there are more advantages.
Very nice accommodation at cheap prices is a rare combination. Here you will find only hostels and private houses which offer shared accommodation. It is popular among low budget travellers. Hostelworld.com works best in popular major cities and provides with the cheapest and finest accommodation as close as possible to the central area of a city. People usually use hostelworld.com for long stays.
Booking Tours
When it comes to tour booking services, getyourguide.com outranked most of the other tour guide services. Getyourguide.com works in 19 languages and almost everywhere in the world encompassing most of the scenic tourist sites in every existed country. They offer vast variety of tours with a lot of paid/unpaid sports and entertaining activities. Some of the tours are expensive but definitely worth trying at least once in a life. Besides, there are plenty of standard tour packages with breathtaking excitement. Getyourguide.com also offers a free cancelation 24 hours before the tour or activity starts. The service is 100% trustable and reliable.
Viator.com stands prominently among the best tour booking services. When it comes to quality and reliability of the service it competes with the best tour guides. Viator.com has something special, it offers short tours ranging between 1 hour and 72 hours. If you want to travel on your own but need tour guides for specific destinations, viator.com is the best service out there. Furthermore, the prices are cheaper than other tour booking services.
Tour Radar provides with the breathtaking tours in almost every country in the world with the range of 6-21+ days trips. The tour guides they provide are usually locals who have vast knowledge about the area and are fluent in English. A good quality service at fair prices makes it stand among the best and trusted tour guides in the world. Tour Radar also provides with the tour packages in remote areas all across the world, so you can witness a hidden scenic view of natural landmarks.
TRAVEL CARDS
While traveling, travel cards became an essential part of the journey. Revolut allows you to hold as much money as you want in your card in more than 30 currencies and it supports 140 currencies. The best way to use the Revolut card is to avoid unnecessary conversions and to use the local currency of the country you are in. If you are travelling in the UK or European countries, the Revolut card is the best choice. Plus, the ATM withdrawals and currency conversion are 100% free, however, the conversion in a currency that isn’t included in the service may charge a fee.
Transferwise competes with the Revolut, however it is the best choice if you are traveling anywhere out of the Europe. Transferwise can hold 50+ currencies in a card and supports 96 currencies. The capacity to hold vast number of currencies allows to avoid the conversions in more than 50 countries. Transferwise allows free ATM withdrawals with monthly limit of $270, while it can be used unlimitedly for purchasing online or in physical stores/shops, and it’s also accepted in restaurants all over the world.
FLIGHT COMPENSATION
How many times it happened to have your flight cancelled before? Did you know you can make a claim and get FREE money if some conditions are met? Claimcompass.eu is one of the highest rated companies that activates on the flight claim market. It is trustable, and has a 4.7/5 rating on TrustPilot out of 1500 reviews. It is a free service and it won’t cost you anything if they will not win your case against the flight companies. If they do, they will keep a 35% commission on any claim they win for you.
I have been successfully using their service and I have been compensated twice. Flight-Delayed winning fee is only 25%, lower than the other flight claim companies. Sometimes, the compensation time can take up to 6 months. Flight-Delayed has a very high success rate and wins almost all the cases submitted to court.
TRAVEL MONETIZATION NETWORKS
CJ stands for "commission junction". Cj.com is an affiliate marketplace where advertisers and publishers pay and get paid respectively. Travel advertisers who want to boost their sales create an offer through CJ. Whereas, publishers seize the opportunity to make some bucks by sending traffic to the advertiser's website or business, when the traffic converts into customers, the publishers get paid according to the commission rate. CJ.com is one of the oldest affiliate marketing founded in 1998 and now stands among the most trusted affiliate markets. It's also been used as travel monetization network and has helped grow business of many travelling services.
Sharesale.com is another platform for travel monetization. The base of the work is similar to other affiliate markets, where advertisers pay and publishers serve them, though the terms are different. There are also slight differences in tactics and strategies. Shareasale.com allows you to keep track of stats, it provides with several reports such as merchant summary, historical trend, traffic report etc. Furthermore, you can boost your sales through sharesales.com via different types of advertisements. The travel affiliates (or any affiliate in general) use different ways to engage traffic such as by creating simple text links, attractive images, pages, and product showcase. With all its exceptional and similar attributes, sharesales.com is listed among the most trusted, reliable and world-wide used platform as travel monetization network.
Travelpayouts.com is one of the few best monetization network sites. Travelpayouts.com works with the affiliates allowing them to share profit up to 70% received from any booking. Travelpayouts.com hasn’t limited the affiliate program to the websites only, but it allows travel bloggers, travel agencies, SEO experts and anyone who wants to join the program and is willing to earn money on the internet. Plus, if a user books through a link of any affiliate, his data will remain stored for 30 days, which means if he returns within 30 days for another purchase the same affiliate will gain profit.
Blogging and Business
Tailwindapp.com works with Pinterest and recently started with Instagram as well. It allows you to create dozens of pin design ideas by choosing a base picture. It also helps with sending new pins to relevant boards at an engaging time by just scheduling them. Furthermore, it allows you to see which pins are fetching traffic to the content and also the most clicked pins. Tailwind.com has so many STATS that even Pinterest doesn't have so many. From my point of view, is a MUST. You will also get a free trial so you can check it out.
Optinmonster.com is a plugin tool for WordPress. It allows you to create signup forms for your website. It provides with the numerous cool features for signup forms, such as floating bars, inline forms, lightbox popups, full-screen overlays and the list goes on. OptinMonster helps increase the numbers of subscribers and signups by catching as many emails as possible. With the subscriptions and collection of huge amounts of emails, the business conversion rate grows rapidly. They do not offer a free trial but 14 days money-back guarantee.
Canva.com is a solution for those who aren’t familiar with the tricky tools of graphic designing. There are plenty of varieties of designs available in different categories in ready-made templates. Templates for Social media kit, logo designs, business cards, postcards etc. can be acquired for absolutely free. However, the paid subscription such as Canva Pro and Canva for Enterprise is also available for extra cool features. You don’t need to be a designer for using Canva
In the community of bloggers and content writers, Grammarly.com has a prominent value. Grammarly helps you improve the writing style, corrects the grammar, punctuation and spelling mistakes. It also provides alternate best-suited suggestions for the context. It also shows you how clear or engaging your text is. Besides, there are some paid features of Grammarly that provide with advanced assistance and plagiarism check for the text.
WEB HOSTING
Having a website is a must for every travel blogger and Hostgator.com is one of the best hosting providers on the market. I am currently using a business cloud package and I’m very happy with it. They have over +850 employees, host over 10 million domains, offer 24/7 support and it guarantees a 99.9% up time. While most of the hosting providers give a 30days money back guarantee, HostGator raised it to 45 days. You can choose between monthly and yearly billing periods and offers a free migration service for all the new accounts.
Bluehost.com is one of the most established web hosting companies in the world. They offer a full range of web hosting services and different materials, training and tutorials on how to grow your website. They have very low-priced packages for the first year but it gets more expensive after that. Between February 2020 and January 2021, they recorded a 99.96% uptime. All their packages include unmetered bandwidth, free global CDN and SSL certificates, making it one of the best providers on the market.
