Rapid Travel Chai

WebRotation is a regular feature on travel websites. Baseball is the not the best source for universally understood metaphors, but the idea of a regular pitching ‘rotation‘ composed of core starting pitchers supplemented by relief pitchers of different specializations and utility maps well onto web browsing habits.

For example, ITA Software is part of The Rapid Traveler’s daily rotation for researching airplane fares, but it does not provide booking service, so in thehttp://rapidtravelchai.boardingarea.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=50&action=edit case of booking a Delta flight, he will tap the otherwise unusable delta.com as a ‘closer’ to complete the booking, conveniently locking in benefits and bonuses tied to his elite status and credit card. WebRotation strives to cut through the clutter for readers to develop their own travel web rotation appropriate for their interests and acceptable time commitment.

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With apologies to Mrs. Rapid Traveler, The Rapid Traveler is besotted with a website he came across yesterday: Frequent Flyer Bonuses. Global in scope and fast in use, this site collates travel offers for airlines, hotels, car rentals and credit cards. There are focused country pages for Canada, the UK and Germany.

A glance at any of the pages shows the bewildering array of offers from these companies and this site drastically reduces the time needed to locate and compare offers as well as suggesting offers that might otherwise go undiscovered. All of this information can be found elsewhere but no other compiles it so well:

• Airline offers: especially useful for airlines outside your typical rotation and airlines with poor promotion functionality on their websites. Included are not just airfare specials, but partner specials for car rentals, hotels and other offers, information that is often tedious to locate.
• Air route offers: great for brainstorming and trip ideas, where else would you come across double miles for Ashgabad-Minsk on Belavia Leader?
• Hotel offers: includes general offers, partner offers and country-specific offers, which again can be difficult to locate otherwise. But does not include everyday partner earning arrangements, only special offers, so for instance you won’t see the standard partner mileage earning available at Hilton properties.
• Car rental offers: a good selection of mostly airline (and some hotel) special offers, but does not cover the full, bewildering array of car rental offers out there (such as the excellent Costco member discounts). Autoslash and Car Rental Savers are better.
• Credit card offers: good collection of the best public offers for many cards in many countries. For US-based readers, there are often better targeted and special offers, with details on blogs like Frugal Travel Guy, Million Mile Secrets, One Mile at a Time, The Points Guy, and View from the Wing. Be careful – this becomes as addictive as it is lucrative.

Verdict: starting-rotation worthy. Great for ‘equal opportunity’ travelers that will base decisions on bonuses and for time-starved travelers that want a good deal but don’t want to hunt around a lot of websites. In areas such as rental cars and credit cards there are better resources but this is a good start. Big kudos for breadth of global coverage.

(Disclaimer: The Rapid Traveler has no financial relationship with Frequent Flyer Bonuses and will not receive any commission or other consideration for this recommendation.)