I’m excited to introduce Relovate, a new travel planning website. It has some really unique features that I haven’t seen on other travel planning sites and I think you’re going to love it! In a nutshell, it’s a website that you and your friends can plan a trip collaboratively from flights to hotels and activities and book it all in one website – but without any higher prices that if you did it on multiple sites AND it keeps your budget in check. I’ll show you how with this Relovate review.
Relovate Review
In this review, I’m going to address what Relovate is, what they do that is unique to them, and who would get the most out of using Relovate.
How does Relovate work?
When you go to the website you’ll see that it does a lot: searches flight deals, hotel deals, car rental, and activity bookings. While that in itself is awesome the thing that caught my eye is that you can also choose your restaurants and attractions. So, basically, you can not just book every aspect of your trip but plan it.
An example of this would be before I went to Nashville with my family, we were in a group Whatsapp trying to talk about restaurants we wanted to try, shows we might be able to see, and what the top attractions were in Nashville to check out. It was an unorganized way to do things and hard to tell if we were all on the same page. Had we had this website at that time, we could all be looking at the same thing and within the website been searching the best restaurants and attractions.
When I plan big backpacking trips with friends, we always used Google docs but this is so much better than a blank document we all just write it – it’s a full itinerary totally organized with software made specifically for this purpose.
What does Relovate do that other travel website don’t?
When I travel plan, I have always started with flights, then hotels, then adventure activities I want to try. Lastly, I add in restaurants, bars, and cool places to visit in the place. I use MANY websites to do this. Relovate does this all in one place so it’s saving you a lot of time.
You might wonder why it hasn’t been done before and if it’s too good to be true – aka are they charging higher prices? Usually, when there is something like this it’s a concierge type website directed toward luxury travelers only and they are charging a higher fee to make travel planning this easy. Relovate doesn’t – they don’t have any fees or ads. They simply use the same search engines for flights, hotels, and activities that you’d see if you searched on Expedia or Kayak. You actually still earn your points and miles just the same as if you booked through any other search engine or directly with an airline.
I did a search for London to Paris and got results of $132 with Air France. I searched on Kiwi.com who I usually use and there are flights for $80 with EasyJet. Relovate had originally not included carriers like EasyJet because the price shown doesn’t include luggage and sometimes even a carry-on, but they have since decided to change that and have started adding in all the low-cost carriers so you’ll see all the same rates listed. I know some people won’t fly budget airlines but for short flights, I don’t mind them. Once you find a flight you like, you simply click “consider” and can do this on multiple flights so your friends can help decide which they like best.
They are using software to get this all in one place, on one website without charging you for it. That’s pretty cool. They also monitor changes in price, so if you have a hotel or flight that you are considering, you can add it and get alerted when the price goes down. While you plan your trip, you can add multiple options to compare prices and start narrowing it down as you go.
I named my trip “Paris”. Next, I looked up hotels on that trip and it saves the dates from the flight search – saving time. Paris has an overwhelming amount of hotels, though, and it needs to be filtered. You can filter by a name of a hotel you know you like, guest rating, star rating, or amenities.
I searched a well-rated 4-star hotel with free high-speed internet which narrowed it down a lot. You can then start clicking hotels in the area you know you want to stay and “consider” ones that stand out but for me, I can’t visualize it like this so I clicked on “show availability” which switches it to a standard list with prices rather than a map.
Once you make the filters you want for your hotels, you can “sort” them. You can sort this list by price low to high or by distance but once you do the original filters go away. A lot of the hotels were around 100 Euro, and I “considered” all the ones that had the best reviews and photos.
Next, I added in a car rental and found an airport pick up and drop off for $69 USD total price. I thought I was dreaming because that is too cheap, but it is real! You can see on the left of the screenshot all the companies that they search.
You can now see on my trip planner my hotel options, car rental options, and the flight I selected in one place. You would continue you this with attractions, activities, and food.
Okay wait for it- this is the fun part:
I can go to my budget tab and see all the options lined up and start check marking what I want. The budget calculator will change as you add and remove things. You could add that fancy hotel and see the budget go up, so then unselect your flight and change it to a low-cost carrier to bring your overall budget back down. You could see that you are under budget and decide to upgrade your car rental or add an activity. It’s amazing! I’m obsessed with this part of it and as someone who loves to budget for trips, this is really cool and something I’ve never seen before.
My favorite part about this is the collaborative trip planning which is easy and you can see your friends’ changes in real-time as they do them. Beyond that, you can chat with them on the website privately. But the cherry on top is that once you have it all planned out: flights sorted, perfect hotel chosen, and all your adventures planned – it doesn’t have to be one person paying for it and others paying them back – you can split the cost within the website and all book totally separately. Umm, best thing ever!? This is very useful for people on a budget. You just click “collaborate” and can add the traveler to your “trip”.
Who is Relovate good for?
- People who like to keep travel planning simple
- People who don’t like to take a lot of time planning and like to just “book it” and be done
- OCD, Type A folks like me who want to see your plan all organized in a pretty format!
- Those who are traveling with friends or family and want to book together and split costs through the website and book individually
- People on a budget – this website finds good deals but it also has a budget calculator that keeps tabs on what you’re wishlisting and you can see if you are starting to want a little too much on your dream trip and need to cut back a bit.
- People who are planning more than one trip at a time as it can separate the trips completely.
Overall thoughts on Relovate
The only downside of this website is that it does take some time clicking around to get used to the interface and feel comfortable with how it’s all designed and organized. The unique features that are offered on Relovate make it completely worthwhile to take the time to learn how to use this website. I would say with about 15 minutes of playing around you’ll get the hang of how your trips are organized.
The best parts about this are the collaborative aspects and the budgeting. I have never seen a site that can keep tabs like this on a budget where you have multiple flights, hotels, activities, car rentals, and more all in one page on their site with checkboxes. You click and unclick until you find a travel plan that matches your budget. This is truly something unique and is the main reason that I will use this even on non-collaborative trips in the future.
The activities are a little overwhelming to look at on the platform so I recommend also searching blog posts to see what bloggers are saying about tours and read some reviews to help you narrow down what activities you might be interested in. Maybe you never knew you’d be into a wine tasting tour or food tour until reading a review on that specific tour. While the site has everything you need to book and see reviews, it’s always good to do a little side research and implement that into your planning on Relovate.
Really enjoyed reading this article, thank you for sharing such an informative post on relovate, I’ll deffo be checking it out.