TravelGrove in Close Up

Published May 13, 2010 at 3:12 p.m.
TravelGrove, the compare and save travel website, has asked us to take a close up view of their latest website, so let's take a look...

The message is clear, TravelGrove.com obviously wants to become the default, indispensable travel planning site. Travellers have the opportunity to compare prices and hopefully get the best deals available on major travel categories such as flights, hotels, car hire, cruises and vacations. Of particular interest to us here at "Casa Dolcetto: Italian Insights" are their deals on cheap flights to and from Italy, as well as their Italian hotels and vacations.

Let's start with the Flights, Hotels and Car Hire areas.

The search engine used in the Flights area is designed to find the cheapest and the best offers available. All you have to do is enter a "From" airport, say "London Heathrow" and "To" airport, say "Rome", some travel dates, the number of people flying and after a few seconds you have cheap flights to Rome in front of you. You can filter your search by time and airline or search directly at Kayak. eDreams, lastminute.com, TravelStoreMaker or faredetective, TravelGrove's Premium merchants. Disappointing then, that there was no sign of Lufthansa's current 2 for 1 deal on the London Heathrow to Milan Malpensa route. I

In the Hotel area TravelGrove have over 100 travel partners that handle hotel deals around the world and again their search engine is apparently designed to find the cheapest and the best offers available. It certainly did when we looked for a room in Milan this Saturday night. Significantly cheaper than the other hotel booking sites we looked at.

As to the Car Hire area, well our experience was not so good, we tried to hire a car at Milan, Rome and Turin airports next week but got zero results returned. On delving deeper via ticking the CarRentals.com box we got redirected and found a good selection of vehicles from the usual suspects.

Now for the Vacation, Cruise and Deals areas.

In the Vacation area, their search engine uses over 100 top travel providers to locate the latest deals available on the Internet. Simply complete a couple of the blank fields, choose a "From" and "To" location, which enables their engine to narrow down the results and you get the perfect matching offer. In the Cruise area the parameters are slightly different, select either a cruise line, a destination, a month or the length of cruise and hey presto you get the offers! Lastly in the Deals area you start your search by filling in the "Keyword" field, using a specific query such as "Italy vacations" for example and going one level deeper through some of TravelGrove's partners, like eBookers and Escape Wizard, we tried searching for a vacation Rome, in late June, and achieved some good prices.

The Travel Guide area is in theory a great addition, here you can access information about thousands of destinations and delve deeper into a location's history, sights and even nightlife. At the moment it would appear that most detailed information relates to the USA. The information on Italy for example is basic and sparse at this time, Rome, Venice and the Milan travel guide are highlighted but there are less than 40 Italian locations within the Italian Travel Guide area.

Finally, we come to the social interaction area. In what's perceived fashionable these days, TravelGrove's community area is where you can create your own profile, travel journal and "Where I've been map." Upload your travel photos, share your travel experiences, post comments, chat in their forums about destinations and meet people who share the same travel ideas and interests as you. This is a very much a horses for courses area. If this is your thing - great, although the chatter seems not to have taken off yet, pardon the pun, especially as we could not find any 'chat' about the recent and ongoing Icelandic volcano disruption in their forums.

Overall then, this is a really easy site to use, albeit with a slightly bland but very functional design, however a site that is evolving and with some great deals. Whilst obviously aimed more at the American market at the moment, hopefully Europe and particularly Italy will soon catch up in terms of quality and quantity! TravelGrove.com is certainly on the way up, bookmarked and at the top of our list for deals on flights, hotels and holidays.

Please note that this is an unbiased and sponsored review, in accordance with the latest FCC guidelines.


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