A relaxed holiday maker is a lot like a boy scout, or Batman, or that one guy who survives the zombie apocalypse – they get there through extreme levels of preparation. Yes, if you want you can just get an entirely pre-packaged experience, and relatively cheaply as well. But that’s hardly your dream holiday is it? The trick is, not to plan everything down to the last details, but to keep a tool box of sites and companies that will let you be spontaneous in interesting ways. Like Batman.

And let’s face it, no dream holiday beats the thrill of knowing you just got your hands on a bargain others missed. With that in mind, here are the sites and apps that will help you put together your own dream holiday, and for less!

Don’t be afraid to be spontaneous

There are plenty of places you can book last minute holidays. One tool is to use travel aggregators, such as the one at Holiday Hypermarket, to find deals close to your departure date. You’ll do best with some flexibility on destination, though—and this tool, as well as the sites listed over on Independent Traveller, can help you discover new spots as well as grab deals on old favourites. These not only get you some great prices, but can take you to some surprising destinations as well! Try setting your search parameters as wide as you can and just see what it throws out at you, whether it’s a self catering villa in the Greek Islands or a grand hotel in Egypt.

Homes away from home

Don’t be bound to just villas and hotels either. Whether you’re travelling alone or as a couple, sites like AirBnB can give you a great place to stay as well as a free guide to the best hot spots and night life in whatever city you happen to land in! Particularly for families, renting out a full-size accommodation can mean saving a lot on food costs as you can cook meals at home—and discover a neighbourhood inhabited by locals, rather than other holidaymakers.

Entertainment

Also think about what you’re going to do on your holiday. Seatwave is a great way of finding cheap tickets to plays, concerts and sports events, sometimes even if they’ve sold out. What makes this sort of site good is that it allows you to find hard-to-come-by tickets without running into the over-inflated prices and deeply dubious ethics of ticket scalpers.

Eating

When it comes to finding somewhere to eat there are whole stores full of apps that’ll help you find somewhere nearby and tell you what people think of it. Yelp is one of the most popular ones out there, which means it’s also one of the apps most populated with restaurants and reviews. It also gives you a precise range of search filters to make sure that if there’s the kind of restaurant you’re looking for nearby you won’t have scroll through several pages of sandwich shops to find it.

Keeping an eye on the weather

Of course, the very best plans you make can still be destroyed if the rain gods decide to smite you. Now if you’re anything like me you probably just good “Name of location, weather today” and let Google do the rest, but when you’re out and about there are plenty of apps that will help you do the job quicker and easier. I wouldn’t normally recommend Yahoo’s anything, but Yahoo Weather is a neat little app that gives you all the information you need quickly and easily.

There’s not an app for controlling the weather yet, but it’s probably in the works.

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