One of the great things about traveling the world like we are doing is that we constantly experience things that other travelers will experience. This includes everything from the joys of seeing new places to the frustrations of trying to get the best deals. So we thought, wouldn’t it be great if we could have a tool that searches through all (or at least a lot) of the online travel sites and finds the best rates from each of them?

Since we like to solve any problems or difficulties we encounter we decided to implement just such a tool. And if it works for us, why shouldn’t we let travelers all around the world use it too? Hence we’ve added that great tool at hotels.worldiki.com. You can also see the search form on the lower left side of the main Worldiki.com page.

How does it work? Simple, you just input the city you want to find a hotel in, and the dates you want to stay there, and it will search over 30 travel sites on the internet for the best fares! Once you find a hotel you like you can then compare the fares from the different sites side by side and decide where to book You can also browse hotels by country, city, or search for a particular hotel name.

After you use it I’m sure you’ll wonder what you did without a tool like this when booking your hotels! At least we did So head on over to hotels.worldiki.com and give it a test run. Oh, make sure to bookmark that site so that you’ll have it handy when you need it in the future!

As we’ve mentioned countless times before, one of the most time consuming parts of our travels is planning our trip and the most time consuming part of planning is usually finding the best accommodation, in the best location, and at the best prices.

Since we’ve encountered this, maybe you have too. If so, you’ll be happy to hear that we’re putting something together to help with that.
What is it? It’s a tool to help you compare the rates of hotels in many different online hotel sites and find the best rates for each hotel!! It also shows you nice google maps of the hotels, and reviews from other travelers who have stayed there.

Right now we’re still testing it out so there might be a few glitches, but if you want to see how it will work, or search for the lowest priced hotel for your next trip, you can check it out at: hotels.worldiki.com

Here’s a sneak peak of how a search for hotels in Bali might look. Can you believe you can get one for $8USD a night??

Whether you’re traveling for business or pleasure, one of the most important decisions of your trip will be where to stay :).

Since you’ll be spending your sleeping hours there, a good hotel will give you a good night’s rest and that will make the trip easier, whereas a bad hotel can ruin the whole experience. This is even more obvious if you’re going to be spending longer periods working from the hotel as we have done.

1) Trip Advisor - Most seasoned travelers will already be familiar with this site. It’s a great resource as you can read reviews about different hotels which are written by fellow travelers.

In theory this should give an unbiased opinion on the hotels. In reality though, some unscrupulous hotels create multiple accounts and give excellent reviews of themselves. “The Field Village” hotel which we stayed at in Chiang Mai, Thailand is one that we strongly suspect of doing that. On some days it seemed there were more good reviews than guests staying there, and the good ones were all over the top, praising the staff and owners by name. The bad reviews were all terrible though, and when we got there we could understand why. We’ll give more details when we review this hotel ourselves.

A tranquil paradise?

Or a noisy, out-of-town trap?

So while we do use this site a lot, all reviews should be taken with a grain of salt, and if the rating difference between the good and bad reviews is too high, one should be suspicious.

2) Octopus Travel - This is one of the first places we go to look for a hotel. Rates shown are the entire rate you pay, no hidden fees or taxes, and they are usually competitive.

One downside is the lack of boutique hotels in the system.

3) My Travel - Using some major travel providers as a backend, this site guarantees the lowest hotel rates. Sometimes though, there aren’t as many hotels as in other systems.

4) Hotel Club & Rates to Go - While both of these sites are owned by Orbitz, each can yield different results with different availability. That’s why in our experience it’s best to search both of them and then compare.

5) Venere - Although they don’t have as many hotels as other sites, they provide an excellent amount of information on the hotels they have. They also allow you to select hotels on a map, which makes it a great resource!

Having the hotels on a map is really very helpful, especially for travelers like us who like to walk around cities and explore them at our own pace. Being situated in the center of town or the outskirts can make a big difference in transport time and cost and we’ve found some great hotels in the center of major European cities through this site. One confession, even when we found a hotel in a great location through this site, we sometimes booked it on another site that offered a better rate!

There are many, many more sites that offer great information about hotels around the world. One good way to find them is a simple google search

If you’ve all read part 1 of this, you’ll be quite prepared for working and traveling the world. Here are 4 more points that you should remember before traveling.

5) Keep a backup of all your important information either online or somewhere you can access while traveling but that’s not on your person.

You don’t want to lose all your itinerary and trip details, work documents, customer projects as well as all the phone numbers of your customers, travel agents, family etc in one go. But this can easily happen if your laptop and/or mobile phone is lost or broken.

There are many companies that provide secure online backup solutions, or if you have your own rented server somewhere you can upload stuff there.

6) Figure out how to handle those recurring events that require your signature.

You’ll still have to file your personal tax return, renew your insurance, etc. And if you’re a company there will be a lot more things to do, depending on the country your company is in you might have to file your annual general meeting, company tax return, audit, etc.

Can you do all that online? If not, get a secretarial firm to help you with the bulk of it.

7) Plan your trip.

Now that you’ve got everything ready it’s time to plan your trip. For a long trip this can be the most time consuming of these steps and I’ll write a post dedicated to just that.

Have an emergency backup plan.

What will you do if you fall ill in the middle of your trip? Do you have global insurance? Where will you fly to for treatment?

What about if you get robbed of your valuables? Do you know how to cancel all your credit cards? What will you do after that?

Shit happens, always have a backup plan. If your hotel is trustworthy and they have a safe keep some money and credit cards there while out. Have emergency phone numbers of people you (or the doctors) can call if you fall sick.

And most importantly, be careful and have fun!