Tools For Planning Transit

Besides all the miles and points planning, I use some tools that help me find my hotel, find the right bus, and all the details I normally don’t write about.

Normally, I write about the high view stuff. How to get free hotels, best miles credit cards, cheapest miles to each region of the world… all broad things.

But we actually live on the road. I find a hotel every week, and sometimes everyday. We orient ourselves to a new city every week. And we do most all of this on public transit.

I’ll very briefly mention miles and points resources… although most of them are on the resource page. Then we’ll dive right into the details, like how do I get from the airport to downtown, how do I get from one city to another, etc.

 

Quick Tips on Planning Out the Miles/Points Stuff

First of all, I will quick recap some ideas for planning the miles and points or free travel end of things.

• Complete list of credit cards by miles earned
• Complete List of Airline Award Charts & Complete List of Hotel Award Charts
• Cheapest Miles To… series
• Miles Calculator

And for hotels, I use the following maps to find points hotels, depending on the need.

• My Complete Maps – when looking to burn a certain brand’s points… since I usually only stock up in 1 or 2 type of hotel points at a time
• Hotel Hustle – shows award availability and prices for a specific city, and sets award alerts.
• Award Mapper – shows all brands’ award prices at the same time on a big map

Yada yada yada…

 

Rome2Rio

Holy cow this site is awesome. It’s so awesome that I decided to go back after writing a bit and add this at the top. It’s not only the best way to get to your hotel, but the best way to figure out… everything. So quick plug for them saying that this is the best answer for almost everything.

Not only can you type in and search for a city, but airports, hotels and any specific destination and it will spit out all the transit options and a decent price estimate.

It can even search ferries in Thailand, buses in Europe

I will say that it’s not complete, so if the only option is one you don’t like, try searching a different way. It only showed one bus from Ankara to Cappadocia and it was in the evening, but upon searching doctor Google I found a different company with an early morning bus option.

 

Getting From The Airport To Your Hotel

I’ll start with landing in a city, as that’s the first thing you’ll have to take care of.

In the past I’d mostly just show up and ask the information desk or wing it. I would say now I at least do a quick check before hand, but still find it totally reliable in an airport that isn’t in a tiny farflung place.

 

Airport website. The most reliable way to find out what transit runs to and from the airport is the airport’s website. I’d say that you should look at your hotel website, and it certainly doesn’t hurt, but sometimes the hotel doesn’t include public transit, or it doesn’t have current info.

But often airport websites will have prices, links and complete info for transit. I sometimes check the route of the airport bus to see how close it goes to my hotel.

 

Rome2Rio is particularly cool because you can see multiple options and prices at once. I actually think Rome2Rio is particularly good at airport transit. I check once and memorize the bus number I need and head out the airport doors to find the right bus. It’s just been that easy.

 

Google Maps Transit. One thing I like about google maps, is that even if they don’t show routes for buses or subways, they will most likely have bus, tram, or train symbols on the map. Sometimes I zoom in on the map to see the public transit stops near the hotel. It could tell me that I need to get to the subway line or something like that.

I also try to remember where on the map my hotel is, this way I can find it on MapsWithMe or the Google Maps app.

 

Getting From City To City

SkyScanner

In my post on How To Search Discount Airlines I elaborated on using SkyScanner quite a bit, because it’s awesome. It’s not only one of the most complete ways to search discount airlines (which most sites don’t search), it has some of the most broad searches.

For example you can search from a city or country to “everywhere”. This will show the cheapest flights, first by country, then by destinations, for the time frame you selected. Or you could search city/country to a country, and it will show the cheapest flights first by city, then by dates.

Also, you can search a date, a week, a month or even a year.

With so many discount airlines in Europe and Asia, I use this site a lot.

 

Rome2Rio

In terms of Bus or Train options, Rome2Rio does a great job of providing a tool to do this. Plus, you can search from hotel to hotel so you can see how to get from your current hotel all the way to your next hotel in another city, including the long distance transit and the short distance transit.

Here’s an example of Rome to Florence.

In this example I can choose a train that’s slightly more expensive but gets there in 1 hour and 21 minutes, so 20-some minutes quicker than the other train. Let’s check the price. I click on the train I want…

Now I click the main “Scehdules and book” button, and it will take me to the website needed to book the train.

Every now and then it shows the wrong site for booking, or it doesn’t have all the bus/train options. So again, if you don’t see an option you like, do a quick search on Google. But if it works well, I don’t waste time searching and I just book what they suggest.

Oddly enough, in this example I just learned that they search for “Rideshares“. They showed BlaBlaCar as an option. Now this isn’t a search tool, so it’s not pulling up availability, but it suggests it because it’s common in Italy and seems to have tons of options.

 

Picking A Hotel

There are a number of things that I think about when looking for a hotel in terms of price.

1. Is there a good deal to use hotel points?
2. If not, is there a promotion to earn points?
3. Can I do a Best Rate Guarantee to get a free night?
4. Can I get amazing deals on paid nights using coupons with booking sites, booking site best rate guarantees, buy-one-get-one deals (like ClubCarlson’s weekend bogo)?

Etc… Plus, there are the points resources I listed at the top (like complete maps).

However, finding the right location is important to me. One thing I often do is go to Hipmunk.com and search a city for my dates and look at the map. Hipmunk’s placement of hotels on a map is the best. But there are few things you can do besides search by hotel brand…

You can put pins on the map to show certain landmarks to get an idea of where you want to stay. For example, in Istanbul I could use the search bar on the map to put a pin down on the “Hagia Sophia” (for example). Then I could click it again to only show hotels in walking distance.

Not saying this is where you want to stay… but it could be. IDK, I like the tool and think about location a lot when picking a hotel, so I assumed others would find it useful as well.

 

Conclusion

That is about the amount of planning I do for travel. I sometimes check cheap flights ahead of time (using skyscanner), and Rome2Rio relatively last minute.

Although I’m perfectly happy not planning ahead at all, just booking hotels and finding them when I land. I’m telling you it’s not that hard, and the information desk is often more complete than online searches.

Which isn’t to say that you shouldn’t plan, but rather that you shouldn’t stress about it. Like with packing… it just doesn’t matter. Over packed? Oh well, you’re carrying a lot of crap. Under packed? Oh well, you’re going to have to buy toiletries in Bangkok. Humans live in every city and have the same basic needs. Don’t be intimidated.

My biggest fear is booking a hotel in an industrial park miles outside of Hamburg and being stuck there for a week, not that I can’t find the bus.