When it comes to planning a trip, it’s very rarely easy. What is there to see in the area? What are the cheapest flights? And, if you’re hitting up a number of places in one trip, how do you manage the booking process through so many destinations?
Having a passion for travel is one thing, but a passion for travel planning is an entirely different ball game! You have to be passionate about excel spreadsheets, comparisons, and breaking the record on how many tabs you can have open before your internet decides to crash!
And it’s even more difficult if you’re trying to collaborate and plan a trip with family or friends. Sometimes the planning process is all so overwhelming that you wonder if travel is worth it in the first place.
Though what if planning and booking a trip was genuinely easy to do? We’ll let you in on a secret – it is! For independent travelers who don’t like to use a travel agent, and prefer to set their own itinerary, there’s now an easy way to plan your perfect trip. All of a sudden planning becomes fun, with Relovate.
7 Reasons Relovate is the Easiest Travel Planning Website You’ll Find
Click on any screenshot throughout this review to enlarge
What is Relovate?
Relovate is a new point-to-point travel booking platform that has been created with the sole aim of simplifying the process of planning / booking your travel, and creating your itinerary.
It allows for a full vacation to be planned and booked on one website, as opposed to using 5 different sites/services. You can plan and book your transport, hotels, flights, accommodation, attractions and even restaurants, all on the one website, keep track of your budget, and print the itinerary at the end.
And, a unique feature which really sets this platform apart from other travel booking sites, it allows for real time collaboration with family / friends. Since using this platform I’ve found that it’s the easiest travel planning website you’re likely to find. Here are 7 reasons why.
Travel Planning in One Tab
Until I heard about Relovate, my travel planning usually involved 15 to 20 different web browser tabs. Which was fine, I loved my tabs (though admittedly my internet would crash!).
But having recognized this pain point, the developers of Relovate created a portal for access to everything in one tab. Once logged in, you can easily get prices and book all aspects of travel in one place; flights, car rentals, limos, hotels, activities, restaurants, attractions and events.
And one thing I personally found fabulous, is that when searching for flights, or hotels, the “select date” calendar color codes the locations you’ll be, so you have easy reference to the dates you need for each place without having to … wait for it … open another tab!
Click on any screenshot for a closer look
Trip Planner Main Screen
Search for flights …
Search for hotels …
Search for restaurants …
User Experience is Top Notch
The platform is ridiculously easy to navigate, and within a few minutes I understood how everything worked. It’s very well structured, as simple as possible, and everything is clickable when you want to expand for more information (like hotel reviews).
Looks wise, the website is very sophisticated, and as a bonus it has no fees, no ads, and no cookies. That’s right – the whole travel planning experience is ad free (unlike my website!!!).
The platform is free to use, so my guess is that they make their money as an affiliate, meaning they get a small % of the travel you book, at no additional cost to you. Travel planner template.
Comparisons are Easy
A very cool feature of Relovate is that searching for hotels, activities, restaurants, attractions, etc, you can add them to your itinerary as “considerations” before you actually book.
You can add as many considerations as you wish to each location, without having to commit, and this makes comparisons really easy.
As you continue to plan your travel, you can remove those from your list you’ve decided not to go through with, and then once you’re done with your travel planning, let’s say in a week or two week’s time, you can book!
Real-time Collaboration with Family & Friends
What Google has done for real-time collaboration on documents and spreadsheets using only a web browser, Relovate has now done for travel planning. The platform is the first of it’s kind to feature real-time collaborations with family and friends. Vacation itinerary template.
You can easily invite others to collaborate by sharing the unique private link for your trip, which means everyone has input for building the perfect itinerary. Everyone instantly sees all suggestions, and you can chat privately via a Facebook-style real-time text chat. Itinerary planner template.
The even better part? Everyone can book individually! You won’t have to break your brother’s knee caps for not having paid you back!
Click on any screenshot for a closer look
Multiple Potential Itineraries
Relovate isn’t just for one trip, you can use the platform for planning multiple trips at once. The “My Trips” tab is your core screen which allows you to jump between different itineraries. And you can add as many trips as you want, giving each a name, and custom cover photo to differentiate.
But you can also duplicate trips so you can create multiple potential itineraries. With the ease of sharing with family and friends, this is a great feature for group travel, as you could create 3 choices, and share it with everyone, asking which one they like most. Sample travel itinerary.
If you find you’re planning too many trips at once (is that even a thing?!), you can sort your trips to display by travel date, trip name, or the date you created it. Or you can use the search tool. Relovate also keeps record of your past trips in a separate tab if you want to use that information again.
Build Your Budget
Another fabulous feature of Relovate is that you can set trip “budget” and compare prices of multiple considerations, making it easier to stay within a fixed price point.
The budget tool is incredible; it keeps track of everything you’ve currently booked, and displays everything you have listed as a consideration, allowing you to check / uncheck different combinations to figure out what you can and can’t afford.
It’s also one place for all your reservations, which not only makes it easier to track how much you’ve spent, you only have to log into one platform to find everything.
It’s an Itinerary Creator
After you’ve finished planning your travel, putting your bookings into a travel itinerary is the next step. Prior to using relovate I had fancy grid layouts in a Microsoft Word document where I would manually type information about hotels, activities, times, flights, etc.
But Relovate will create your itinerary for you. After you’ve booked everything, you’ll find a printer-friendly “itinerary view” with downloadable calendar information to integrate with your favourite calendar software (such as Google Calendar).
This is incredible and saves you so much time! As general travel advice, I always recommend you print multiple copies of your itinerary; one to carry with you on your trip (paper copies come in handy if you can’t get online), and one to leave behind with someone you trust, so that they know how to contact you if an emergency arises at home.
Brands You Can Trust
The great thing about Relovate is that they work with brands that you trust. When searching for hotels and flights, all of my favorite brands come up, and I can book as I regularly would.
The prices are the same as I would find from any other search engine if I opened up my beloved tabs! And when booking hotels, airlines and car rentals, you can still fill in your membership number to earn loyalty points and miles.
Conclusion
In a nutshell? I highly recommend Relovate – it’s the easiest travel planning website and itinerary creator you’ll find.
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23 Comments
Looks very helpful and a good tool.
I’m always looking for ways to make travel planning easier … thanks for introducing this site to me!
Wow, this looks like a big help for anyone who wants to properly plan their holidays. I love the fact that family members and friends can work together on it in real time! I bet it makes it so much simpler to have it in one tab as well. It’s amazing that such a powerful tool is for free, although I wonder wether it will stay like this. They might add some adverts later, but it would still be an amazing application!
Whoa! This is something worth reviewing and writing about! Everyone glorifies travel but travel planning is one of the MOST essential parts of a trip and it can get pretty harrowing at times. I completely feel the multiple tab problem. Happened with me so many times and I get tired comparing :( The best feature is that it gives multiple options plus you can share it with friends making communication easier and less taxing! Definitely trying this one out! Thanks Meg!
Man, you really do like your spreadsheets my friend. Dead give away when you got all excited about the color coding.. lol!!! (Takes one to know one methinks)
This sounds a must have, I love the planning stage, maybe it’d be different if I got to travel more, but, for me it’s all part of the journey, but Revolate sounds amazing.
I’m currently embarking on a trip to Morocco and Portugal and having something like Relovate would have been a lifesaver! Will definitely use them for future travel.
Hello, Megan, I generally use other websites for my research, but I used the link of Relovate and really loved the site. I could research everything trip-related and must say, the site is really user-friendly. 1 thing, in particular, caught my eye. When I search Calgary – Delhi – Calgary trip, I am able to select flight times. Majority of websites give this flight time for the whole trip YYC-DEL-YYC. Whereas, this site gave me an option to choose YYC-DEL & DEL-YYC flight times separately. This is really helpful when I select prices based on flying time. Thanks for reviewing this awesome website.
Well1 That sure makes travel planning as lil easier. Seems to me like a good combo of skyscanner and tripadvisor! Loved the itinerary building bit and the “considerations” too!
This looks super useful so I am going to give it a whirl. I used to use something else but never remember its name so maybe it is time for a change
Oh this site would makes travel planning easier? Does that mean i can plan more of my travels. Something to check out especially when organising with friends and families
For those who travel a lot, this is a very useful site indeed. No more separate tabs, no notes to tell you which sites have the cheapest flights or hotels. Have you ever checked directly though, if there’s a difference between the prices in Relovate and in the hotel/airline website? I wonder if they add a little bit extra.
Never heard about Relovate before but it sounds very handy trip planner. It would definitely save a lot of my time. Can’t wait to surf on it now since I have some family trips coming up in the coming months. No more panda eyes from spending too much time on internet, lol :p
Relovate looks like a great one stop shop app to plan all your travel. Great that you can search for restaurants too. Thanks for the review.
Any tool that makes travel planning easier and I am in. So, I clicked across to Relovate to check it out myself and it definitely seems like a site I would be using in the future.
Easy is the key word for me. The website is easy to use and the design is smooth and clean. I don’t have time to spend hours learning to find things I need. Hotels, restaurants, flights all right there and planning a trip is as easy as a couple of clicks.
Oh wow this would have been handy to use when I was planning my Italy trip with my friend and sister last fall. While I am a lover of excel this is much pretty and easy to comprehend than my charts!
Great and very informative blog posted here. Thanks for sharing such an amazing blog with us. I just really love to travel different places in the world
Having all you need to plan at a single point is so convenient. When we plan our trips, especially when traveling with the family, we plan for everything from meals to activities to airport transfers. Usually this would involve research and reviewing multiple sites. Relovate seems to have everything at one place which is so convenient.
This is perfect for planning group trips. Like the ease of having everything on one central portal. I checked out the food options and they are quite impressive :) This is a really cool travel planning tool. Noting it for future group trips. Great review.
Wow this is a one-stop tool to plan literally everything on your trip. Thanks for showing us this tool as there are so many travel websites out there I don’t think I’d have known about this without your review!
I was already sold on this being a great site based on the first point! I can’t stand having multiple tabs open, huge pet peeve of mine! I also love that you can add hotels simply as options before booking, a much easier way of “bookmarking” your options.
This would be really helpful if I planned trips more than about 5 mins in advance. I like that I can plan multiple itineraries that is really useful for frequent travelers. This also seems to make it really easy to plan a trip for people who don’t travel a lot.
Very useful post. This is my first time i visit here.Thanks a lot for sharing. Keep blogging.
thank you for sharing such a good blog with us