Vacationing, Planning & Scanning the Sky...

Since last couple of days, I have been looking for something or someplace to surprise my better half on our tenth anniversary. Can you imagine surviving ten years of fighting, nagging, forgiving, and all that Bollywood style emotional drama? But so what..atleast we were together in it and plan to celebrate the next tenth milestone in a more enthusiastic and fun way too...fingers crossed :-). We were very young when we got married..just straight out of college..began our carriers and life together. And I can say he has been my silent companion and supporter throughout the thick and thins...

We have one more buddy who has been a spectator of our companionship and togetherness throughout these ten years. We laughed, danced, got drunk, and even cried with it. Before you start guessing and imagining about the third entity in our relationship, let me tell you its our very own Goa.

(pic courtesy - www.skyscanner.net)

Goa is not a place or destination for us. It's our common best friend with whom we have always celebrated our friendship and union. And you know in a marriage there are very few things on which you can agree upon :-). It's our place of solace away from our monotonous and stressful professional lives where we relive our college and courtship days.

Though this is the vacation for which our bags are always packed but the planning associated with it is really frustrating and tiresome. The tedious and annoying task of going through dozens of websites for travel, hotel, sightseeing logistic etc. leaves us cranky and irritated. We always try to dodge the planning part on one another :-)...But this time for a change I got a chance to try SKYSCANNER for my vacation planning.

But before entering the planning zone let's quickly go through my vacation itinerary -

i)  Flights (both ways) Pune/Goa  

ii) 5D/4N Stay at Vivanta by Taj, Fort Aguada.

iii) Sightseeing on Anniversary Day.

iv) Airport transfers.

With a total budget of Rs 1 lac.  

So with this mind boggling list, I visited www.skyscanner.co.in and I must say I am really impressed and amazed. Flights, hotels, buses, and even car hires, it's all under one link and that is so awesome !! The Homepage is really user friendly with all the required tabs under one roof and informative articles like "visa friendly destinations" can certainly give you more option for your destination. The best feature which has become my personal favorite is "Recent Searches". Through this you can save your last five searches and that too without even logging in. It is really convenient and time saving.

While booking the flight I was bewildered by the informative and easy interface of Skyscanner. Sort by price, number of stop over, departure time, airline etc. ..you name it and they have it. But the most useful and practical feature which I really liked was booking a pickup and drop cab to/from airport alongside the flight. No extra effort of booking a cab from your home to airport and vice versa. Chose the flight and transfers too in one go...

Then I moved to the hotel booking section and here came one more convenient attribute of the website. It already had all my data from the flight booking tab i.e. Checkin/Checkout Dates, Number of Nights, and Number of Guest...Wow!! I straightaway started looking through options and to my surprise the prices and deals appeared to be comparatively low to other websites. You get about thirty to fourty options by clicking on one deal link...amazing isn't it..Grabbed a nice deal..booked the hotel...pheww..

As planned, I wanted to hire a car for sightseeing on our anniversary day and accessed the car rental tab. It too had three variant of cars i.e. economy, intermediate, and premium. Off course I chose the premium one for my anniversary..yay!!. and an economy car for airport transfers.. But fun apart, one more VERY useful feature that I encountered in car hire tab was the option to chose the "Driver's Age" of your cab. I know being a female, how much this can help you if you are travelling alone or are on an all girl's trip..Thank You Skyscanner!! 

And the sightseeing and transfers were done too..:-)

Apart from all the useful and functional feature of website it appeared that the price of all services were comparatively low than its other counterparts. There were no extra charges or any hidden fees with any of the deals. The reason for it is Skyscanner is "FREE" for users and takes charges from the agents resulting in lower prices for us. 

And here we are after three steps and less than thirty minutes later. Flight check, hotel check, sightseeing check, transfers check...all done and all in budget!!

We often go to Goa and it has become a cherished buddy and companion of us. We have lot of beautiful memories of it and plan to make more in the coming years. 

But this time I must say and thank Skyscanner: you improved my overall vacation and travel planning experience. Now onward it would not be an excruciating and horrendous process for me. My lot of time was saved and got a good deal too...:-)

Hats off to the team behind Skyscanner too who is doing a fabulous job of sorting and putting all the USEFUL travel data under one platform. I am really bowled over by the user friendly, vivid, and..in budget experience of Skyscanner.

I have also downloaded the Free App on my smartphone. Now I am good to go.

Skyscanner has become my travel buddy for life now...and yes...now I understood the meaning of your name ..surely you are scanning the sky to give me an amazing travel experience...

Bravo Team Skyscanner!!!!  

"P.S. - To have a similar experience like mine, just click on Skyscanner or any bold letter in the post" :-)

This post is a part of Skyscanner travel wizard activity at BlogAdda.com