On this page you’ll find a list of travel resources that we use to plan and book our trips, starting with websites we use to search for and book our accommodation and flights.
In this list, you’ll also find some of the tools we use for running Wanderlust Designers.
These are websites, tools, and other things that we personally use and can recommend, with comments on what we like (and maybe don’t like) about them.
Elsewhere on the site, you can see some recommendations from us that we haven’t used personally – but, in any case, be sure that we’ve read reviews before putting them there. Here, though, I repeat, all of the resources have been used by ourselves.
The list will be updated from time to time, so make sure to check it regularly!
This post may contain affiliate links, which means that if you purchase anything via them, we might earn a small commission – at no extra cost to you. Check our affiliate disclaimer for more information.
HOTELS
Here you go, our favourite hotel booking websites. We use them to search for and usually book hotels, although we always check the hotels’ own website as well, to see if they have better prices or deals.
- Booking.com is one of our favourite hotel booking websites. They have a great selection of accommodation and good deals. And there’s a loyalty program – when you complete at least 2 stays in 2 years, you get a “Genius” discount – 10% – on select properties; when you complete 5 stays in 2 years, there’s a 15% discount on select properties on top of the 10%, complimentary breakfast on select options, and complimentary room upgrades on select options;
- Hotels.com – another great hotel booking website with an excellent selection of accommodation, although we do use it much more rarely than booking.com. They also have a loyalty program, where you collect a stamp for each night you stay, you get one night as a reward. The value of your reward night is the average price of the 10 stamps you collect. You just have to sign up for the program! Be sure, though, to print your reservation – we had a situation in a hotel where we booked a stay with dinner included, but the hotel wanted to charge us for it.
FLIGHTS
During the “Searching for flights” phase of vacation planning, we usually compare the flights on select websites, and more often than not, book them on the actual airline’s website.
But to see our options, we use these websites:
- Kiwi.com – so many things I like about kiwi… you can check flights on a map – they’ll show the best prices. You can choose to include trains and buses in the search as a mode of transportation, which will show you a connection to a nearby airport if the price will be better that way. There’s a “nomad” function, which offers longer stays in stopover airports, giving you a cheaper ticket price to the final destination and a chance to explore another place. And so on, and so on. If you decide to book through kiwi, they actually have a connecting flight guarantee. So, yeah, it’s a great option.
- Momondo – another great flight booking site. What I like about momondo is the graph that they offer for flight price comparisons, and the possibility to choose the “best”, “quickest”, and “cheapest” options. The same as kiwi, they have an “explore” function, where you can check the cheapest flights for your dates on a map.
- Skyscanner – I like that, when searching for a destination, Skyscanner allows you to check out flights, hotels, and guides for that place, and it shows other places in the same country that you could explore.
TECH AND ACCESSORIES FOR TRAVELLING
Since more often than not we’ll be either studying or working somewhere on the road, we need reliable technology, as well as convenient accessories such as bags, suitcases, etc.
- Laptop – Lenovo IdeaPad 5 PRO. I see that now most of them come with either Flex or Touchscreen – I wish the price was this low for these extras when I was buying my laptop, but oh well. Lenovo IdeaPad5 Pro with 14″ display is light and powerful, and the battery holds quite long.
- Owala reusable bottles – we’ve used Owala bottles for quite some time now. I started with a 0,7l plastic one (which is the cheapest option), but now I’ve bought 1,2l insulated bottles, 0,7l insulated bottles, and even a 0,4l insulated kid’s bottle. It’s really convenient to use (I love having the choice of drinking through the straw or normally!) and in summer, the insulated bottles keep the water perfectly cool.
- Decathlon hiking backpacks – we’ve had the Quechua 30l hiking backpack for many, many years. It’s survived going to Patagonia, Atacama, Sardinia, and, well, basically all over the world. The 30l one is very comfy, and spacious, has many pockets, and is durable. The 20l one is not as great, but still works well.
- Samsonite suitcases – durable, light, and big – what else is needed when travelling? We were buying cheaper suitcases before, but those got destroyed way too soon. The other suitcase in the picture above is one I got when working as a flight attendant, and although it’s quite durable, it’s not so convenient for packing.
BLOGGING TOOLS
Running a blog isn’t just writing articles. It requires quite a few tools to make sure people know about your blog and come and read it. So here are some of them:
- WPMU DEV– straight from the creators of the exceptional plugins Hummingbird and Smush! No website can work without hosting. WPMU DEV offers dedicated hosting for a very reasonable price and the hosting is great! The site is fast, and the server is very reliable. Plus, the customer service – out of this world, those guys are the best of the best! We don’t use it anymore, but I still love it.
- Lyrical hosting – since we decided to start an extra blog, WPMU got a bit too expensive. So we moved to Lyrical, as it offered great stuff for a better price. Use WD10 for 10% off your first purchase.
- A theme – we are using Kadence. It just seemed that with the blog growing and me starting to understand better what I want and need, the Kadence theme with the Kadence blocks came the closest to fulfilling my wishes. They are lightweight, and even the free version has a lot of features. I’m using the free versions for both the theme and blocks, and that’s completely enough for me for now.
- Tailwind – a Pinterest and Instagram scheduler. It makes them so much easier! Just schedule your pins, and Tailwind will do the rest. Saves so much time AND increases traffic!
- Canva – I use Canva for basically two things – creating pins for Pinterest and stock photos. The packing lists that you can get on our website (just check out the packing articles) are designed in Canva as well.
- WP Rocket – a website speed-improving plugin. The theme, plugins, images, videos, colours, fonts… every single little thing slows down the website. So, to have it work nicely, it’s a good idea to have a caching plugin that also helps improve other things. After going through a bunch, I’ve found that WP Rocket helped the most. So I definitely recommend it.
Blogging courses
We’ve taken so many blogging courses that I’m putting them separately.
- Travel Blogging 101 – Shelley has so many great courses and tools for travel bloggers! We used her affiliate course to update the affiliate articles, SEO course to update the others, and many of our affiliate articles have her affiliate tables in them.
- Nina Clapperton’s courses – 6 months to 50k is a really great course to set your blog up for success! It’s full of great info on how to write proper articles, find keywords, and rank on google. She has many other great resources, some even for free! I’ve been eyeing her roadmap course for some time now, as well.
- Scale Your Travel Blog – in the end, though, I signed up for Scale Your Travel blog, as, first, Nina is Laura’s student, and second, Laura offers what she calls “bridging the gap” – as part of the course, if you buy the full version of the course including coaching, you get so many bonuses, including keywords specifically for you, site audit, and so many other good things. And if you can’t afford the full price, they have a “just the course and Facebook group” version without the coaching included which is a lot cheaper.