Travelaxe – A Super Cool Tool for Planning Your Next Trip Feb 27 '04 (Updated Mar 09 '04)    Write an essay on this topic. Tweet The Bottom Line A really useful tool for those planning a trip - especially for those who are Las Vegas bound. Hi again, This article is a bit of a change of pace for me. Rather than reviewing a specific travel destination, I’d like to talk to you about a tool I recently discovered that you might find extremely useful in planning your future vacations. It’s called Travelaxe and I first heard about on a Las Vegas travel board (Travel2Vegas.com) while poking around for information (I’ve an upcoming trip there). Some of you may already know about this tool, but I was completely ignorant of its’ existence. If you do already know about this terrific tool, you might want to skip the rest of this review, if not, read on. SO WHAT IS THIS THING AND WHY SHOULD I CARE ABOUT IT? Essentially, Travelaxe is a metasearch tool that you download from Tavelaxe.com. The purpose of this tool is to accept data from you (ie destinations, dates etc), then search any number of travel-related websites and interrogate them for their posted prices for hotel rooms, rental cars, airline tickets etc. In other words, rather than you going out one by one to sites like Hotels.com, Orbitz.com, Travelworm.com etc, the Travelaxe application does it for you, then displays the data found at each travel website all together in an easy to understand spreadsheet-like format so that you can contrast and compare the prices offered on the different sites (it's really interesting to see the variations) side by side. The spreadsheet shows the hotel name, the rating, and the best price found, followed by a column for each travel website (ie Orbitz, Hotels.com etc) showing the prices found on that particular site. The best price found is highlighted in yellow and given it’s own “Best Price” column and there is also a column showing the savings between the lowest and highest prices found. In addition, there is a separate spreadsheet tab to pull up a map of your destination (with links to additional useful info) and a tab to see the trip information as you entered it (ie dates, destination etc). If you click the “Book It” button, a new tab is opened which takes you directly to the chosen websites’ booking page, where you can book your selection immediately (clicking the button seems to always select the site with the lowest price, not sure what you need to do to selection a different website). It goes without saying however, that you do not need to actually book anything in order to use the tool and compare prices. I did notice that when Orbitz was pulled up with the “Book It” button, you needed to enter the city (location) in order for Orbitz to find the hotel in question – the Travelaxe application obviously does not transmit that information, though all the other relevant info is pre-loaded for you onto the Orbitz screen. I also found that when you click the “Book It” button and thereby pull up the site in question (Orbitz etc), the price actually does vary a little (just by a couple of bucks usually) from the price shown in Travelaxe. In my experience these prices are always a bit higher than those shown in Travelaxe so I thought that perhaps that there may be surcharge being added on by Travelaxe. However, when I went directly to the Orbitz site and set up a booking for the same hotel for the same dates, I got the exact same price as Travelaxe ended up with. So… I’m not sure why the final price ends up being a bit more than the posted price, but in my experimentations with the tool it seemed the price difference was always pretty minor. Still, you might want to play with the tool a bit and do a few comparisons yourself until you are comfortable that you are getting the same price displayed on Travelaxe as is displayed by going through the original travel site itself. I also noticed that there are a number of different filters you can select from in order to narrow down your choices. I have not yet tried them out, but they look interesting. You can also run multiple instances of this tool at the same time (by simply running the program a 2nd time) so that you can see the data from more than one location by just bouncing between the 2 different windows. DOWNLOADING AN APPLICATION ONTO MY PC? I’M NOT SURE I LIKE THAT! As you all know, downloading an app, any app, brings with it risks. You always have the chance of it being a bogus application that’s just meant to infect you with a virus, possibly hijacking your machine for nefarious purposes like spreading the virus to others or spying on your websurfing habits and collecting data like passwords and account numbers. So, I did a web search on this tool before I installed it. It turns out that PC World magazine has an online article “The Best Free Stuff on the Web” where they recommend this tool. According to them, it searches listings for 35,000 hotels in 535 different locations in 35 countries. It works especially well when searching for accomodations in Las Vegas (covering almost all the hotels in the area and checking a large number of search engines), but also works for other locations as well. Note that not all locations will pull up the same number of search engines. If you’d like, you can read the online article here: http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,111109,pg,1,00.asp After reading this, I decided that Travelaxe was probably safe and downloaded it. SO HOW DO I GET THIS TOOL AND INSTALL IT? Installation is very simple and free. Simply go to - Travelaxe.com - and read the instructions for downloading the tool. It’s simple and straightforward to install and fairly easy to use (even without reading any instructions). It runs under Windows but I’m not sure about a Mac. Note that each time you run the application it will ask you for a login and password. You do NOT need to enter these in order to run the tool and look around. SO, HAVE YOU ACTUALLY BOOKED ANYTHING THROUGH THIS TOOL? Actually no - though apparently a lot of people have. I did of course do a lot of searching with it to try it out, but the fact is, I found this tool too late for me to use this trip, for my bookings were already completed when I stumbled upon it, but I do plan to use it for my next trip (at least to search and compare). I will still search elsewhere as well, since Travelaxe does not search ALL the travel websites out there (Expedia and Travelocity seem to be missing, as is Costco travel, a site which I’ve found often gives me the very best price), just many of them. Hopefully future releases will search even more websites. In any event, I do think this is a worthwhile tool to check out that can save you both time and money when planning your trip - at least for your initial comparison shopping. So take a look and let me know what you think. It's not the be-all-end-all of travel planning tools, but it does seem pretty useful - especially, as I said, for those planning Vegas trips, but for other places as well. In any event, I suspect you’ll like what you see. I know I did. See the world while you can, Ken PS - Wasn't sure where to place this. Couldn't find a proper category.

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