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Tourstogo. com, named Queensland Business of the Year in the recent Telstra Business Awards, sells more than 2500 Australian tours through its website and is a model for how easy the process can be.
The Cairns-based company has adopted a Wotif-style booking engine that gives you actual availability and prices for given dates, so you don’t have to wait for someone to get back to you.
And while tour prices usually vary little day to day, the site displays “hot deals” for selected dates, similar to what you see on accommodation booking sites such as Wotif.
Tourstogo so far only sells Australian tours, but there are other options for booking overseas tours and activities.
Qantas Holidays has adopted a user-friendly tour booking engine (qantas. isango. com), making it easier to search and book more than 5000 tours and activities around the world.
It used to be a case of choosing your destination and then leafing through pages and pages of the relevant brochure; now you can search by country, region or city and by type of adventure, from extreme adventure to bird-watching tours.
You can also search by clicking on a map, if you find that easier, and you can choose different currencies if you want to compare prices from other sources.
Just like booking a flight or hotel room, all you have to do is choose the tour, enter your credit card details and print out the confirmation to take with you.
Aside from saving you time and ensuring you are booking with reputable operators, browsing a good tour booking site can give you ideas for tours and activities you might not have considered.
For example, you might go looking for a wildlife-viewing safari in Africa and discover you can do it from a hot-air balloon or on elephant back.
Many tour booking sites also allow you to put available tours in price order, so you can find something that fits your budget.
Another site with a good range of tour bookings is Total Travel (totaltravel. com), which covers Australia, New Zealand, Britain and the US. This site is not as easy to search as some but does have a good range of tours, along with a selection of deals.
Finally, how to book hotel rooms cheap and below it’s published rates. Normally you will have to search through many hotel bookings website to find which website offers the cheapest rate and deal. Now, you don’t have to go through that trouble anymore as HotelsCombined now helps you find which website offers you the cheapest hotel rates with just one click! It saves you time, electricity, effort and MONEY!
So why bother visiting your local travel agents when you can book and organize your holiday trip online?