Can Travelgrove.com Help You Find a Cheap Weekend Away?
Travelgrove.com specializes in finding cheap flights, cheap hotels and cheap holiday deals by searching through a myriad of other travel sites.
Right now, I’m trying to sort out the logistics for three or four trips that include both long and short haul (I know, poor me) so I thought I’d start by testing what Travelgrove could come up with.
Finding Flights
I started with their cheap flights to London section, which despite listing everything in dollars allows a fully international search at the bottom of the page. Travelgrove then scoured other travel search sites, such as Kayak, Expedia and Fare Detector, to produce fares just as good as the ones I’d found by my usual means.
They make no guarantee that they’ll find you the cheapest flight, since they point out that other sites offer price bidding (a more complicated but sometimes feasible way of buying a cheaper ticket.) However, they feel confident that they’ll probably find you the cheapest flight, which seems fair.
On the three examples I tried, I haven’t been able to find a cheaper deal elsewhere.
Beyond the Price – the User Experience
It’s a plus to only have to enter your details once rather than visiting each travel search site individually, although this benefit was slightly undone by the lack of an easy-to-find “flexible dates” option. Not the end of the world, perhaps, but slightly frustrating given that I’m often looking for the cheapest price instead of a flight on a specific day. That’s less of a concern when searching for weekend travel, though.
The chance to set up an email alert for the price you were prepared to pay and both the time and price filters on the left hand side were also handy. Yet, like many of these flight search systems, Travelgrove struggled with a multi-stop route (e.g. London – New York – Miami – London.) Again, not so much of a problem for weekend travel.
The hotel search, while good, had similar frustrations. Although you can filter by price, it was trickier to find a hotel based on location. This is a minor point if you’re searching for a hotel in a small city like Bath or Toulouse, but a real hassle in London, where a hotel’s location can add up to two hours to the journey time.
Travel Guides & Community
Social media and online communities are all the rage these days and Travelgrove have their own version that seems to be coming along nicely. It doesn’t have anywhere near the size and scope of behemoth TripAdvisor yet, but perhaps some people will prefer that. It’s not the sort of thing that matters to me, particularly, but that’s not to say that others won’t love it.
Moving on to the travel guide section, though, reveals the only serious chink in the armour. I started with their London Travel Guide, since I know the city so well. Even glossing over the many mistakes with spelling and grammar, the layout of the material is rather, er, bizarre. Hyde Park, for example, is listed under London Nightlife despite the fact that it closes at midnight and is probably somewhere to be avoided at that time of day anyway.
So, my overall impression?
A fantastic place to look for cheap flights and accommodation, but not for travel guides.
Disclosure: This is a sponsored review that I accepted as long as I kept full editorial control (to say the good, the bad and the ugly and to choose where to put my own links.) Read the full disclosure policy here.
