Travelzoo

As a regular international traveller (Asia, Africa, Europe, South America) I like to find the best deals for hotels and thus wanted to see how travelzoo compared to other sites on the internet. I also reviewed the “all deals” section of the website which is geared towards all inclusive holidays and trips.

Immediately the website looked easy to navigate: the website was well laid out and the graphics were well presented. When searching for the dates of the hotels it also had a feature to search by the month: at first this excited me as I felt it would allow me to see which dates in a given month gave the cheapest hotels. However, whenever I tried using it (ie Bogota) it returned no results.

When searching for popular destinations such as London, Paris, Barcelona, travelzoo returned many results. However, in a large city such as Bogota only 3 hotels appeared in the search results. No results appeared for a world class destination such as Cairo. Thus, travelzoo appears extremely limited when it comes to hotel searches. In Bangkok only 4 hotels appeared under their search, with the cheapest at $71/night, which is extremely expensive by Bangkok standards. Thus, I don’t recommend using travelzoo for searching for hotels.

I then looked at the all inclusive deals available on the website: travelzoo returned much more search results here than for hotels. The best deals travelzoo had for Bangkok, Doha, Myanmar and Cambodia were at least $100/day, including flights and tours. Independent travel in these countries would be far cheaper than the deals offered on the website: however, for those who are cash rich and time poor, the all-inclusive offers on the website may appear attractive. Frustratingly, in order to actually book one of the packages offered, you have to actually sign up to the website via your e-mail address and create an account. I feel this is inconvenient and slows the booking process: it will also mean that travelzoo will send daily e-mails with promotions unfortunately.

David Jones

I am a professional travel writer and travel enthusiast who traveled the world twice, so I am sharing my firsthand knowledge about everything related to travel and spending time abroad.