Below we have put together a list of all our favorite travel resources, starting with the websites we use to plan and book our flights and hotels.
These are websites and tools we personally use and can recommend. We have also included some of our favorite blogging tools. We use these tools all the time and they are crucial in running our travel blog.
At the bottom of this page, you will find our favorite photography and video courses.
We will be adding and expanding to these resources, so before you go on your next trip be sure to check back for the latest updates.
If you find any of our favorite travel resources below helpful, please consider purchasing via the links here as it earns us a small commission, at no extra cost to you, which helps us keep the site advertising free. Thank you for your support! ♥
Hotels & Accommodation
Booking is awesome for Europe and the US and pretty good in Asia as well. What we really like about Booking.com is that you reserve your hotel room through Booking.com but pay at the hotel when you check-in or out. So if you end up changing your mind, you don’t have to wait for a refund.
Agoda is the King of hotel booking for Asia, and our favorite hotel booking site whenever we travel in that part of the world. Agoda has more hotels and hostels in Asia than any other booking site and usually among the best rates as well.
Hotels.com has a great free bonus arrangement whereby you get every 10th hotel night that you book through them for free (you have to register as a member to get this). We have used that a lot and have saved quite a bit of money when traveling for longer periods of time.
Airbnb is a great site for longer rentals. This site connects you with homeowners who want to rent out their apartment/ home/ rooms. If we plan to stay in a city for more than a week, we will check AirBnB.com to see what is available and what the rates are.
Hotwire sells hotels at huge discounts. We love this website and its concept and have saved a lot of money on luxury hotels through Hotwire. The downside is that you won’t know exactly which hotel you’ll get until after the booking, just the hotel’s class (stars), what area it is in, and what facilities the hotel offer (pool, training gym, etc). We have gotten some incredibly good deals through Hotwire and stayed in hotels we could not afford to stay in otherwise. They don’t work well for remote and small places, but we use them all the time in the big cities
Flight Booking
Momondo is one of our favorite flight booking sites. We have found that it consistently finds the best rates, and unlike a lot of the other ones it also checks the smaller flight operators’ own websites when comparing prices.
Skyscanner is awesome for finding the cheapest tickets when you are not sure exactly where you want to go. Let`s say that we are in Bangkok, but are not sure where we want to go next. With Skyscanner you can for instance easily find the cheapest tickets out of Bangkok to anywhere. We have come across some unbelievable bargains to Tokyo and other places using Skyscanner. Kiwi.com now has similar search capabilities and we tend to use them more these days.
Kiwi.com is a fairly new flight booking site, but it is doing so many things right that we think it might be the future of flight booking. The way the prices are displayed directly on a map makes it easy to spot a bargain. Radius search, where you can specify an area that you want to fly from or to, is a unique feature and frankly quite genius. Their multi-city search is also way better than most of their competition. Add to that a connecting flight guarantee and Kiwi.com is quickly becoming our “secret weapon”.
Travel Blogging & Business
Blogging successfully is a lot more than just writing great content. You also have to make sure people know about your blog and content and that they come and read your blog. We use a lot of tools to help grow our blog, and reach a wider audience, here are some of our favourites.
Bluehost – Starting out you need a web host for your website. We started with Bluehost because it is extremely easy to set up your first website with their one-click automatic WordPress installation. They have good support when you need some help, and their low prices are very hard to beat.
Cloudways – Once your blog traffic grows you may want to move your hosting to a dedicated WordPress host for maximum speed. We are currently hosting with Cloudways and feel they offer unbelievable value for money. Their system does require a little bit of technical know-how to get everything up and running, but it is pretty straight forward and well explained on their website.
If you don’t have any technical abilities and just want a fast managed WordPress web host that will take care of everything for you, we can also highly recommend WP-Engine and Flywheel.
Divi Theme – We used the Divi theme from ElegantThemes.com on our website from we started in 2014 until 2021. And we loved it! The best part of Divi is its Pagebuilder that lets you design the pages of your website using a simple drag and drop system. If you don’t know any CSS and HTML coding, but still want to be able to design a unique look for your website, Divi is a great theme to use. You can read more about our website and what powers it here.
GeneratePress – In 2021 we switched to the Generatepress theme. As much as we liked Divi for its ease of use and design, as our traffic grew it started to feel a little slow. Generatepress is made to be as lightweight as possible and is blazingly fast. It’s not as easy to use as Divi, so I would still recommend Divi for those starting out. But when you need maximum performance GeneratePress is awesome!
CoSchedule – is our social media marketing tool. It makes it very easy to automatically schedule and share our blog posts on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. It takes a lot of hard work out of social media marketing.
OptinMonster – We have tried quite a few plugins to collect newsletter subscribers, and OptinMonster is simply the best and most fully-featured of them all.
Grammarly – English is not our first language so we use Grammarly to help us to avoid making too many spelling mistakes. Grammarly has both a free and a premium version. We started with the free version but later switched to the premium version which has more advanced syntax correction.
PHOTO & VIDEO RESOURCES
Wondering what camera gear we have in our travel bag, and what we recommend? You can read all about it here.
We have learned a lot from various photography courses, and these are our favourites:
Photographing the World by Elia Locardi – If you are looking to improve your landscape photography this is about as good as it gets. It is not cheap and is really not meant for complete beginners, but with more than 12 hours of video tutorials, it is probably the most comprehensive landscape tutorial ever produced. This is the first in a series of four Photographing The World and they are all really good.