When you’re at work, the thought of getting away on holiday can sometimes be the only thing that’s keeping you going. It’s easy to daydream about visiting exotic places like New Zealand, Vietnam, the Seychelles, Cuba or South Africa, but actually looking up flight and hotel prices can bring you back down to earth with a bump.

It’s only to be expected, really. It’s incredibly easy to fly around Europe for little more than the price of a new pair of shoes, and air travel in general has undeniably become cheaper, but it can still be a lot more expensive than you’d ideally like to fly to and stay in those destinations that are a bit further away.

With this in mind, you should be looking to get the best possible deals when you book so you can spend the extra money on meals and souvenirs when you’re away. Fortunately, there are a number of online websites that you can use to ensure that you’re saving as much as possible, wherever and whenever you’re planning to go.

Easyvoyage

To start with the obvious candidates for money-saving, flights and accommodation, there are a number of sites that aim to compare quotes from airlines and hotels for holidaymakers. Easyvoyage is one of the best, offering everything from price comparison for holidays including skiing and cruises to reviews of hotels, the latest travel news and information about potential travel products that you might want to invest in before you leave. It’s a comprehensive travel website that you should check out regardless of your destination – you never know what you might find. Click here for more information about flight comparison

TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor doesn’t save you money, per se (it does have price comparison features on its website and mobile apps but they’re not as comprehensive as other options), but it will stop you wasting it on sub-par accommodation, restaurants, attractions and any other tourist-frequented area around the world. Too many poor reviews for a particular place from its legions of users can break an establishment and TripAdvisor members know their stuff, so it’s easy to weed out places that you’d want to stay from places that you should definitely steer clear of as well as checking that places you might want to stay in offer everything you need it to.

Car Rentals

It’s often the easiest option to hire a car when you’re away to help you get around – some public transport systems aren’t the easiest to understand and they might not cover areas you want to get to, so it’s better to be under your own steam if possible. Obviously you don’t want to be paying more than necessary for a car, so a website like Car Rentals – which collates and compares quotes for cars according to the driver’s age and where and when they want to pick up and drop off the vehicles – is ideal.

Holiday Extras

Holiday Extras doesn’t deal with flights or accommodation for you once you’re away – rather, it handles the little bits and pieces that you might have to book before you go away, like airport hotels and parking. It’s important to be able to store your car safely while you’re away if you have to drive yourself to and from the airport (family and friends should definitely drop everything for you regardless of the time of day, though), and the prices that Holiday Extras come up with for any UK airport are generally easier on your wallet because you’ll be pre-booking, rather than turning up on the day. It’s an extra fee, of course, but it’s worth it for your peace of mind.

Flight Stats

Flight delays are horrible – you’ve probably (if you’ve planned ahead) already been in the airport for a good couple of hours, and then everything grinds to a halt for an indefinite period of time and suddenly you’re trying to use your hand luggage as a pillow. What we often forget, though, is that we can claim compensation in many cases where we’re delayed for a certain number of hours or more (it’s the same with the trains). If you’ve had a flight delayed but you don’t know how long for, you can check using the Flight Stats website and see if you can claim your ticket money or any compensation back.

As you can see, there are deals to be had on pretty much everything that you might have to fork out on when you go away, and these five websites are just the tip of the iceberg. Although you’ll never get to Sydney for the price of a ticket to Madrid, you can at least make sure you don’t spend as much as everyone else to do so – feeling smug is so underrated…

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