With spring break approaching and a desire for more warm-weather destinations, many students will find themselves looking for affordable yet fun destinations in the coming months. Whether traveling home or on vacation, these apps are helpful in saving money on flights and hotels:
- Kayak
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Kayak is great for comparing flights between airlines and deciding on a hotel. The app gives notifications when prices are low, and it’s easy to combine flights from different airlines. They also offer deals on car rental and other travel services.
- Hopper
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Hopper works similarly to Kayak, offering hotel and flight deals. One of the best features of Hopper is its accurate price prediction of flights in the days and weeks preceding the day of the flight. I recently used Hopper to schedule a flight, and I saved more than forty-five dollars due to the accurate price predictions. Like Kayak, Hopper offers flights from many major airlines, and they can be combined on multi-flight trips.
- Hitlist
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Hitlist allows users to add destinations to their personal “Hitlist,” and it gives updated cheap weekend getaways as well as longer trips to hundreds of destinations. Hitlist offers predictions of more or less expensive periods to book flights to each destination. It’s a great app for weekend vacations as well as longer trips.
- One Night
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One Night is a relatively new app that schedules only same-night hotel stays in major cities like London, Miami, Nashville, Chicago and Boston among many others. Their rates are relatively cheap, but they do go quickly. While not the most reliable service for traveling, it offers the ability to schedule a last minute trip for up to seven nights.
- Gilt Travel
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Linked to the clothing site Gilt, Gilt Travel offers deals at hotels around the world at significant discounts. They refresh partnered hotel deals roughly once a week to keep a rotation of reasonably priced options in most major cities worldwide.
Each of these apps serve slightly different purposes in planning your next trip, but they all cut costs and provide an easy booking process for flights, cars and/or hotels. Vacations and trips homes are inevitably expensive, but setting a simple notification through these apps can save a significant amount of money without much effort.