Check out our favorite, tried and true, travel gear on our Amazon shop here!
We get a lot of requests asking what companies we use for booking flights and hotels, and even what tech we use, so we created a list of our favorites.
We use all of these companies, and they’re only on this list because we use and recommend them.
Accommodation
Booking.com
We booked about 90% of our hotel stays in the last year with Booking.com.
We use them because their interface is dead easy to use. We also love the ability to bookmark favorites to plan our stays ahead of time.
Expedia
We use Expedia to get our baseline hotel prices in North America. It’s easy to use, has a huge selection of hotels to choose from, and hotels often have deals that are only bookable through Expedia.
Airfare
Skyscanner
We love Skyscanner for comparing prices and planning long trips. You can search for the cheapest price by month, by year, or even search for the cheapest price from your destination to any location on earth. Highly recommended. Skyscanner often includes discount airlines that many major search engines miss.
Google Flights
Google Flights is still one of the travel industries best kept secrets. It lets you search a month’s worth of fares at a time, and is usually accurate. All prices include taxes. However, it doesn’t have the cool Everywhere search or the Flexible? discover destinations search that shows you a map of everywhere you can fly and prices you’ll find on Skyscanner.
Travel Insurance
SafetyWing Travel Insurance
Recommended by Lonely Planet and National Geographic, SafetyWing travel insurance has competitive prices, good customer service, and solid coverage.
Tech Stuff
We get a lot of requests asking us how to set up a blog. Here are some of our favorite companies we used to set up The Barefoot Nomad and our other websites.
Blogging courses
Nomadic Matt’s Superstar Blogging course is a great place for beginner bloggers to start.
He offers a large course for beginners called The Business of Blogging, which includes almost everything you’ll need to get started as a travel blogger.
Learn more about The Business of Blogging here.
WordPress
WordPress is the world’s number one blogging platform. It’s free and easy to customize.
Namecheap
We were with HostGator early on, but quickly outgrew them, so we switched to reseller hosting at Namecheap for 2014 and 2015. They were a great alternative before we grew big enough to need VPS hosting.
KnownHost
Since then, the blog’s grown a lot, and we’ve switched to KnownHost – Hosting. We’re thrilled with them – they’ve made our websites so much faster! Before we switched, we were constantly getting errors our website was down, but we very rarely get one now. In fact, I can’t remember the last time our website was down.
The KnownHost website seems a little technical, but don’t be turned off. They handled everything from our transfer to ongoing maintenance, and they’ve been helpful and quick to respond whenever we’re reached out.
Update: We’ve been with KnownHost for over three years now, and still love them. Support is fast and responsive, and downtime’s almost non-existent.