Best Travel Tips – Booking from the Internet or Over the Phone

Let’s take a look at the process of booking a flight to give you some of the best travel tips to get cheap hotels and flights. Nowadays everything is set very efficiently in order to allow you to book a flight through the Internet instead of using real persons that earn a salary over the phone. That makes things very easy from the very beginning, as a fare that appears on the Internet will always be cheaper than the one you can get over the phone, as the company will not need to pay any employee for the telephone services.From this point and on, many possibilities are open to you. There are some companies that have no longer real persons on the phone and the only way in which you can get your tickets or reservations is on the net. These companies will normally be cheaper than others that offer the service over the phone, but of course the level of customer service that you can receive if any problems arise is lower. This is the case of low cost carriers such as Ryanair, EasyJet, German Wings, Jet4You, etc.If any of these companies covers your itinerary, one of the best travel tips I can give to you is to always book with them. The only thing you need to check is how much baggage allowance do they have and how far the airport they fly from and to is from the main city you depart from and visit. In the case of a hotel, this does not make sense, and simply if a hotel can be booked online it will be always less expensive than the one you book over the phone.Another of the best travel tips I can give to you is to never book through travel engines such as Expedia, Travelocity and similars. They always charge more than the airlines or hotels booked directly from the web-page or over the phone.For the following best travel tips, we consider that there is no possibility to book a flight or a hotel only over the Internet. Let’s consider the possibility where all the companies that supply travel to your destination offer the both possibilities. Which one to take?Bookings over the Internet may be cheaper, but only 15 Euros per person cheaper in many occasions. What I mean with that is that you are saving, yes, but under which conditions? Many of the times booking through the Internet and getting the best e-deals will mean that this tickets are not changeable or that you will receive no refund if booked in this way. It all depend on you. Probably for a cheap trip you will prefer to risk and in the worst of cases you will not lose a lot of money. In any case, one of the best travel tips for long trips or expensive hotels is to book over the phone. This will offer tickets with the possibility to be changed applying a determined fee and even 50% or full refund cancellation policies and you will be paying just a little more.There is another thing involved with booking online. Sometimes, even if not many, the tickets booked online will be able to be collected only from an office in a determined country. For example, if you book on the Internet from FlightCentre.co.uk, a great company to travel from Europe to the South Pacific, you will need to get the tickets in a UK office, while if you book on the phone you will be paying just 13 Euros more but you will have e-tickets that you can print. Of course this is saving you a lot of money if you are not UK resident, at same time that you get cancellation refunds and changeable flights and passenger names.To summarize, I think that a good strategy is to take the short flights or inexpensive hotels and hostels on the Internet and get your longer trips on the phone. In any case, I would never give a call to an agent before checking all the offers they have on their web-page. The agent will never introduce you to all discounts, but will try to make you get the most expensive deal for his or her company. If you go directly to him and you tell him which flight or hotel you want, then he will have nothing left to do than to give that one to you.In any case, and being this one the best of all my best travel tips, it is the one of getting free travel certificates. I just can’t understand why many people pays a lot for 4 or 5 star hotel stays while I pay 10 times less for the same stay. But there is a reason why they do it. Because they don’t know that travel certificates can be taken for free in certain places, and most of them that will never be lucky enough as to read this article will never know.