Section 07 · Between the airports
Car-hire brokers, rail and bus aggregators, and door-to-door route planners for the parts of a trip that no flight search will price for you.
Ranked
Ties are broken by publication date. A score reflects the platform as reviewed; terms change, so check the operator before you pay.
The best planning tool in this section and a mediocre booking one. Use it to find out what is possible, then buy the ticket from whoever runs the service.
Type two places, any two places, and it returns every plausible combination of plane, train, bus, ferry and taxi with rough times and costs. Then book somewhere else.
The only reliable way for most travellers to buy Southeast Asian ground transport in advance, and worth the margin for exactly that reason.
Bangkok to Koh Tao, Hanoi to Sapa, Phnom Penh to Siem Reap — booked in English, paid by card, confirmed by email. The margin is the price of not doing it in person.
A convenience tax you should usually be willing to pay on a multi-country itinerary, and usually not on a single domestic ticket.
Trains, buses and flights across Europe in one search and one checkout. The service charge is real; so is the time it saves on a multi-country trip.
The most honest results page in car hire broking. Everything else about the model carries the same caveats as its larger rival.
The same broker model as Rentalcars.com, with better disclosure of fuel policy, deposit and mileage on the results page rather than three screens later.
A better app than any train operator will ever build, charging a fee for tickets you can buy without one.
Split ticketing, live platform data and a genuinely good app, against a booking fee the competition regulator has taken an interest in.
A better car than a rental counter will give you, from a private individual, under an insurance arrangement you must actually read.
Renting a specific car from a specific person is better than taking whatever the counter allocates. The protection choice is now the most consequential decision in the booking.
Broad supplier coverage at broker prices, with a dispute path that runs through two companies instead of one.
Booking Holdings' car arm has the widest supplier network in car hire. It also sits between you and the company that actually holds the keys.
