Tools of the Trade

With only a few days before our trip, I wanted to run down some of the tools we used to plan our trip to New Zealand.  The most useful site was the official New Zealand Tourism website.  One of the biggest issues to overcome was selecting the right hotels.  Unfortunately it was difficult to find hotels that would accommodate two adults and two children;  We ran into a similar problem in France where hotels seemed to be designed to accommodate two adults and one child.  We’ll post more info (and reviews) about the hotels as we check in during our trip but for now here is a quick list of the top websites that helped us facilitate our trip:

Expedia – Great tools for reviewing hotels, locations, anemities, etc.  We booked our first hotel with Expedia and their subsidirary Trip Advisor provided very useful recommendations and honest tourist feedback about hotels.

Trip Advisor – As stated above, great for getting a run down of things to do in each particular city and recommendations from users about where to stay.  The only negative comment I have is that Trip Advisor is geared too much towards singles or couples with no kids.  Often, the boutique hotels or lodges they recommended did not accomodate any children under age 14 so we ended up skipping most of the top 10 recommended hotels.

SideStep – After searching most of the airlines and travel sites (like Orbitz), we finally opted to use SideStep to book our airfare.  It is somewhat ironic that Sidestep found us the cheapest airfare through a link to Orbitz yet while looking directly on Orbitz the airfare was much more expensive. Go figure.
Orbitz – Nothing special but this is where we booked our flight from the US to NZ.  We were referred here by SideStep.