I love to travel. It is such an easy thing to enjoy, right? New places, new views, maybe even new food and new friends. One of my favorite parts of traveling actually starts before the actual vacation. I love to plan. I love to look at all the options of things to do and see and work to narrow them down to what works best in my schedule and budget.
I’ve shared before about some of my favorite sites for finding alternative places to stay rather than the typical hotel. In this post, I’d like to share some sites with you to help you plan the activities for your vacation. The two sites are CityPass and Viator.
Now I have to be honest, I haven’t actually had a chance to use CityPass yet. I’ve looked into it many times and hope to use it soon. The reviews are typically good and I would suggest reading through them to get suggestions from others who have made use of them. CityPass offers discounted tickets to sites within one of their selected cities. Usually they offer passes to 2 or 3 of the big name attractions, and then 2 other passes where you select between 2 options. These tickets are typically discounted and some of them even offer a ‘skip the line’ option. I’m hoping to use the Chicago one within the next few months (depending how long the snow holds off!).
The other site I mentioned is Viator. I have used Viator on a couple of occasions and really liked all the options they give. When I did my first travel abroad trip to Germany I worked with a travel agent. She used several sites, but her main one was Viator. When I realized it was a public site for anyone to use I made it my first stop when I later planned a trip to London. Viator has options for travel world-wide. They offer a great variety of tour options, and even have some food options as well as transportation (think airport shuttles!). The website is easy to navigate and the prices are very fair. The information of what to expect is generally pretty accurate as well. I’ve done several hop-on-hop-off bus tours in Europe. Looking at the stop locations ahead of time gave me a good idea of things to do at each stop, or which stops to avoid.
Although my overall experience with Viator has been positive, I did run into a slight problem in London. I had bought tickets for a night tour and selected a specific time. When I showed up about 20 minutes prior to that time I was informed that the site actually had the times wrong – they were showing summer schedule times although the touring company had switched to their fall schedule already. They guy with the bus touring company offered a refund or a seat on the next bus so it wasn’t a big deal. If you are provided contact information it may be good to follow up and verify time and meeting places. That was the only issue I have had so far though.
Happy and safe travels everyone! If you have a favorite travel site please share it with me in the comments.
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