My top picks for the best

Travel Resources

Everything You’ll Need to Plan a Trip

This is where you’ll find helpful links to all my best travel resources, favorite trip-planning tools, sites, and travel resources for booking flights, cruises, hotels, and unique accommodations. You’ll also find recommended sites and apps for travel inspiration, planning tools, and my recommended gear. Sometimes I’ve had to learn the hard way by trying a product and finding out they weren’t as good as they promised. I’ll do everything I can to spare you those headaches.

The posts below include some of my favorite places to eat and drink, the best gear that I use on my trips, and cool lodging that I absolutely love. I’ll be adding more to this page every time I come across great travel resources to help you plan your next adventure, so bookmark the page to come back whenever you’re starting the trip-planning process. Be sure to let me know if you use any of these sources and have a bad experience. I don’t want to promote a service that isn’t doing an amazing job with my readers and VIP customers.

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Important Travel Tools

Best Travel Resources for Before You Leave

Woman holding a large camera crouching down on the beach to take a picture of large iguanas. The ocean is in the background.

Insure My Trip

  • Travel Insurance
  • Cruise Insurance
  • Specialty insurance
  • Trip cancellation
  • Plan comparisons
  • Top travel companies
  • A+ rating BBB
  • Claims assistance

When all travel screeched to a halt a few years ago and people were stranded around the world, I realized how important travel insurance is. This is one travel resource you won’t want to skip.

I buy insurance anytime I’m traveling internationally. I also recommend buying trip insurance anytime you invest money that you don’t want to lose on travel arrangements. If you have any health issues that sometimes keep you from traveling, or when you get older and unexpected issues may arise more often it’s also wise to invest in protection.

Insure my Trip – Travel Insurance
Woman wearing blue pants is walking with a piece of gray carry-on size Travelpro luggage in her hand.

Travelpro Luggage & Accessories

You’ve probably heard the name Travelpro before because they’re known for their high quality products. The original luggage was designed by an airline pilot who knew what was needed for frequent travelers. Now all their products are of the highest quality and the luggage lining is made from 100% post-consumer recycled plastic bottles. Yay!

I love that they offer hard-sided and soft-sided spinner pieces, depending on your preference. I also love that their smaller bags slide over the handles of wheeled luggage to make rushing through airports so much easier. They even have a charging port to plug in your device while you’re waiting to board.

Find Travelpro Luggage & Gear
Black rectangular Anker Portable Charger, Power Bank, 20,000mAh Battery Pack - about the size of a smartphone - great travel accessory

Anker

  • Travel accessories
  • Portable chargers
  • High speed power banks
  • Apple & iOS compatible
  • Avg 4.6 star reviews
  • Wireless charging
  • Tech USB cords

If you use your phone a lot for taking pictures or mapping routes the battery can run down pretty quickly. I love my Anker Portable Charger Power Bank to recharge my phone on the go. It’s about the size of a smartphone. I carry it in my pocket or purse and plug it into my phone to carry me through to the end of the day.

Save Up to 60%, on Charging Accessories

Anker offers a variety of sizes and styles plus cords and cordless charging options for both Apple iPhone and Android iOS products. They even have a magnetic version that attaches to your phone.

Anker Travel Accessories
Cover of a Lonely Planet guidebook for "Best Road Trips Europe" Background image is a historic coastal city with the beach and ocean in the foreground. One of many great travel resources by Lonely Planet publishers

Lonely Planet

  • Travel guides
  • eBooks
  • Destination pocket guides
  • Kids books
  • Culinary travel guides
  • Maps

If you’re like me, so much of the fun of traveling is planning the trip. Lonely Planet carries hundreds of travel-related books and guides including foreign language learning, kids’ activity books, specialized guides for culinary travel, hiking, biking, and snow adventures. Their travel guides cover destinations worldwide and come as “classic”, “authentic experiences”, or “pocket” guides.

Click the button below and use coupon code “TWPSave10” you’ll get 10% off your travel resources purchase!

Lonely Planet Travel Guides

Etsy Creative

If you’ve never had a chance to browse on Etsy, I highly recommend it! First of all it’s a great way to support small businesses and creative artisans. My list of “20+ Awesome Gift Ideas for the Hopeless Romantic” gives a bunch of ideas from Etsy.

This online marketplace gives makers, artists, artisans, and creatives the tools and resources to market their items worldwide. That benefits you, by gathering a world of innovative entrepreneurs in one place so you can search for the original products and gifts they create. Many times they can be personalized or customized or even designed as one-of-a-kind creations just for you.

Handmade Creative Everything
Red circle with the letter P symbolizing the Pinterest social media icon

Pinterest

  • Travel inspiration
  • Research destinations
  • Travel Advice
  • Planning Tips

Pinterest is an excellent free travel resource to help you find inspiration for your next destination. You can use it just like any search engine, like Google. When you enter a city, country, or region and the word “travel” in the search field you’ll see hundreds of pins linking to articles about the area.

Or maybe you’re looking for experiences for a specific travel theme like astronomy, football, or scuba diving. Just enter a question like “best places to go for …” and you’ll get tons of results. I also use it to share my own travel tips, and links to my latest blog posts so they’re easy to save and read later. So you can follow my account on Pinterest to get updates on new travel ideas and tips when I post new stuff.

Find Travel Inspiration
Where to Find

Unique Hotels and Other Lodging

A shady outdoor area in the Southwest U.S. A lounge chair sits in the corner of a yard with cactus and desert-friendly plants and flowers behind it. A white stucco wall is behind it.

Booking.com

  • 30 Types of lodging
  • Casino Hotels
  • Money-saving deals
  • 175K destinations
  • Homes & apartments

Booking.com is a great place to start for reserving unique accomodations around the world. They offer 30 different types of lodging, like homes, hostels, B & Bs, farm stays, boats, even treehouses! It’s easy to customize your search by neighborhood, lodging type and specific amenities needed. Click the button below to find all their “Getaway Deals” starting at 15% off.

Find Hotels or Unique Lodging
Trusted Housesitters logo - an outline of a house with a heart inside and circles representing pet ears on top of the roof

Trusted Housesitters

  • Quality housesitters
  • Loving petsitters
  • Unique homestays

If you love animals and like to keep things tidy, consider being a housesitter or petsitter in exchange for unique homestays around the world. Or if you have pets that you must leave at home when you travel, you’ll find verified and reviewed sitters to care for your pet while you’re gone. Trusted Housesitters has over 180,000 members, so you’ll be sure to find a perfect match!

Trusted Housesitters

Transportation, Cruises, Rental Cars & More Travel Resources

A cruise ship glides on the water at Hardanger Fjord near a small village. A red building is in the foreground. The sky is cloudy and there are rolling hills in the distance.

Cruise Direct

  • Ocean cruises
  • River cruises
  • Worldwide
  • Luxury cruise lines
  • Family cruises
  • Cruise deals
  • Last minute deals

If you’ve never had the joy of cruising, I highly recommend it. Terry and I have taken several cruises. Each one was different, but we loved every one of them. Our latest was an ocean cruise to Norway. It’s on my Bucket List to do a European river cruise soon too.

Cruise Direct has been around for more than 20 years and has access to hundreds of destinations worldwide. They have a “best price guarantee” and plant a tree for every cruise they book.

Ocean & River Cruise Travel

Expedia

You’ve probably heard of Expedia Travel because it’s highly rated and has been around since 1996. If you like to make as many travel reservations as possible in one place, this is the site for you. You’ll find great deals for booking a wide range of worldwide rental vehicles, hotels, unique vacation rentals, pet-friendly lodging, and money-saving travel packages.

Expedia is also an excellent option for finding and booking activities, events, and things to do at your destination. This includes audio and physical tours, venue tickets, theme parks, helicopter and hot air balloon rides, local cruises, and more.

Expedia Travel
Screenshot of Google Flights web page. Graphic at the top shows mountains and clouds with a woman and child looking up in the sky at an airplane. Text says "Flights" and "Find cheap flights from Phoenix to anywhere".

Google Flights

  • Book flights
  • Explore destinations
  • Compare prices
  • Get notifications
  • Date Grid
  • Price Graph
  • Best time to visit

Google Flights is a great trip-planning resource for comparing prices and finding airfare deals, especially if you’re open to finding a new destination that you may not have thought of before.

When searching for airfare deals, Google Flights has a section showing the best time to visit. You’ll know when to expect peak season and off-season rates. There’s also a price graph showing various prices to fly on different days of the month.

Google Flights
Screenshot of Kayak.com Flight search page - it includes fields for departure city, arrival city, date range, number of travelers and search button. One of the best helpful travel resources

Kayak.com

  • Book flights & more
  • Explore destinations
  • Compare airline prices
  • Get notifications
  • Prices by travel dates
  • Price history
  • Best Time to Travel tool

I’ve been a fan of Kayak.com travel resources for a long time. You can use the site to compare flights and prices from hundreds of different flight booking websites, then click through to book the best option directly.

Kayak Flights

Posts About my Favorite Travel Resources