Why Savvy Travelers use TravelPirates
Pack your bags because you’re about to book an awesome affordable adventure!
TravelPirates is an online Boston based travel company that finds the cheapest rates on everything from flights to accommodations to tours and complete vacation packages.
Whether you’re planning a quick weekend getaway or jet-setting around the globe, TravelPirates does the legwork for you and finds the greatest deals.
So what’s the catch? There isn’t one really, but here’s what you should know.
You have to book the fare immediately because the deal will sellout instantly. And you should be flexible with your dates and destination for the best rate. The prices are so good that they’re almost unbelievable.
At the Los Angeles Travel and Adventure Show, I actually met with two members of their team, Calvin Iverson, who is the PR Manager and Jessica Bisesto, the Senior Editor, and they filled me in on everything to know about TravelPirates.
The Voluntourist: For those who don’t know about TravelPirates, describe the services you offer.
Calvin Iverson: We’re travel deals platform. We have a website and an app for IOS and Android. We have a team of full-time deal hunters and they spend all day hunting for the very best value for travel deals–flights, hotels, vacation packages–everything. It’s about the best value for your money, so not necessarily the cheapest. If you know that you want to go to Thailand or Costa Rica and you know that you want to go for a certain time of year, you’re just going to search for the cheapest flight for that time for that region. But, we find the best value trips for the places that you might not even realize are affordable. It could be a deal that you have to take advantage of the next month, or it could be something farther in advance. The key is these deals go quickly, but we’re finding so many a day that if you miss one, you’ll find another one.
The Voluntourist: What’s the secret to finding the deals?
Jessica Bisesto: We use a lot of our proprietary tools that have been created by our headquartered office in Berlin. Then we just do a lot of digging around. We have a lot of affiliate partners, so places like Kayak and Priceline, places that people are familiar with. It’s so time-consuming for our audience to go through and figure out, which dates are going to offer the best prices, will the hotel I want to stay at match up with these dates? So it’s a lot of digging around. We all have a very specific set of skills that we’re able to use. We’re in the trenches every day trying to find the best value deals for our audience.
Calvin Iverson: It all comes back to trust. People don’t believe that our deals are even real so you might not be inclined to book spontaneously because you’re, ‘thinking it can’t be real.’ We have five people on the deal hunting team alone and they’re whole job is to review these properties, the airline, review all of the deals to make sure they’re legit. We’re not sending you to a sketchy booking site. We’re sending you to Kayka and Booking.com. So you can trust that it’s a real company that you’re booking with. We don’t book the travel for you. We just give you step by step instructions to take out all of the guess-work and all of those hours that you would spend planning your own vacation.
The Voluntourist: You find deals I’ve never seen anywhere else before. It’s impressive.
Calvin Iverson: We know what to look out for. For example, with an error fare, like when an airline accidentally prices something too low, they could cancel the fare or they could honor it. We know how to watch out for that. If we see something like $171 roundtrip from Washington D.C. to Chile, we will publish it and say it was probably a mistake. Don’t call the airline–just book it! They don’t have to honor in, but in this case they did. So if you’re a regular consumer and you see a fare like this, you might be skeptical, but we take all the guess work out. We tell you yes, you can book it but just wait a few weeks to book your accommodations because they could cancel it. It’s a guessing game and you kind of have to take the plunge.
The Voluntourist: I love how you take all of the time-consuming work out of it for customers.
Calvin Iverson: Yes and in addition we also try to give you as many travel tips as possible. Jessica has been to Asia backpacking and tells you what the situation is when you land, what the transfers are like, if there are resort fees and other useful information. She won’t gloss over anything. If you’re booking with other websites sometimes you’ll go through all of the steps to book and then it’s hundreds of dollars more expensive than what you thought because they’re not transparent.
Jessica Bisesto: We really pride ourselves on being transparent. Vegas is one of the top destinations that our audience really loves and we’re constantly finding very affordable packages. We’ll also include the prices of the resort fees, so it might look a little more expensive and our competitor might be less, but that’s because they haven’t included the resort fee. We’re all such passionate travelers, none of us want to beat around the bush. We want to maintain this reputation of being really honest and straight forward. A lot of our hard work goes into making sure our users have every detail possible.
Calvin Iverson: That’s where it really comes back to value. The resort fees are popping up more and more, but even airlines offering the economy flights. People booking their own trips look for the cheapest flights and find this amazing fare, but then they realize they can’t pick their own seat, they can’t bring a bag, you can’t even put things in the overhead bins. All of a sudden, booking travel gets so confusing.
Jessica Bisesto: Frequently we find great deals on Norwegian, Wow, Spirit and Frontier. We tell our audience that these are budget airlines, so you’re not going to get all the frills, but they’re still safe and will get you to your destination. They’re great if you pack light, bring a snack with you, get a reusable water bottle and you’re good to go.
Calvin Iverson: If we find a fare for a full service airline and it’s deeply discounted, we will point that out. We’ll put that in bold and encourage people to book it because you’re getting everything for such a discounted rate.
The Voluntourist: Be honest, how often to you find these deals and book for yourself?
Calvin Iverson: All the time!
Jessica Bisesto: Yes, all the time. We found a deal from Boston to Buenos Aires for $350 roundtrip. As soon as one of our editors found it and published it, I immediately put in a request for time off and I booked it. I called a friend and said, “Guess what we’re doing in March?”
Calvin Iverson: I’d say five of us have gone to Iceland within a six-week period because we found roundtrip tickets for $200 roundtrip from Boston.
The Voluntourist: What’s the trick to using TravelPirates?
Jessica Bisesto: Download our app and turn on push notifications. That way if you’re looking for a specific deal like LA to Tokyo in June, you will be alerted as soon as we publish that exact deal. So you’ll be ahead of the game and chances are when you open the deal it will still be available verses if you procrastinate and wait, the prices might be gone.