Search all of your Favorite Travel Booking Sites at once with TravelGrove.com
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If you’ve never heard of TravelGrove and you’re wondering what services they offer, here’s a little blurb about them; “TravelGrove is a meta-search engine that helps users find cheap airfares, hotel and car rentals, cruise deals and vacation packages.”
Due to the fact that there are so many travel search engines out there now a days, most never get any exposure. I just find the travel search engine business to be some what of a dead-end because I believe that unless you’ve got some groundbreaking technology or features, it’s highly unlikely that you’re going to get people to stray from their favorite travel booking sites. On to the experimental flight search!
Flight Search:
Like the rest of the travel booking sites, to search for flights on TravelGrove you simply choose your departure airport, arrival airport, a date, and whether you plan to fly one-way or return. Please note that in my testing I plugged in Boston (BOS) to Los Angeles (LAX), in order to see if I could find cheap flights to Los Angeles.
Results:
Here’s where TravelGrove differs from most other travel booking engines, TravelGrove actually searches all of the major travel search engines including some of it’s biggest competitors to find the best deals around. What interesting about TravelGrove is the ability to search all of the top travel booking engines versus just heading on over to Orbitz for example and doing your search there. With TravelGrove you’re able to search Kayak, TripAdvisor, SideStep, and more all in ONE search.
Here’s the breakdown of my search for cheap flights from Boston (BOS) to Los Angeles (LAX).
- TravelGrove (Lowest Price): $156 USD via CheapOAir
- Competitor’s (Lowest Price): $150 USD
Other Interesting Features:
TravelGrove Forum: The forum at TravelGrove seems to be a bit bare, maybe because there are some big time travel forums out there that are completely conquering the market at the moment. In saying that, I like the simple layout and the organization on the forums. I think if promoted more, these would prove to be more successful in the future.
Travel Guides: Like many travel search engines these days, they’re all adding Travel Guides sections to their sites and it makes a lot of sense. As you’d probably would have imagined, their Las Vegas Travel Guide is one of the most popular guides to date.
Travel Community: TravelGrove actually gives you the opportunity to create your own FREE travel blog. Yes, it will be hosted by TravelGrove and you’ll never feel like it’s actually “your own” but if you have no knowledge on web design, development, or wordpress and you want to be able to document your travels for your family to see back home, then this is the place for you! TravelGrove also allows you to upload your photos as well so you can show off your latest photo of you holding up the leaning tower of Pisa! You tourist, you!
Final Verdict:
I really like the idea of being able to search all of the search engines at once through their site, but it’s still not enough to rip me away from my favorite booking engine. If TravelGrove dreams of one day becoming one of the top three search engines out there, they have some work to do. I think they need to focus more on promoting the brand and making it stick out with catchy advertising tactics in order to make people remember who they are and what exactly they do. As with any travel search engine, there’s always room for improvement!
Overall Score:
6/10
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