Sometimes you don't know exactly where to head on your next family vacation, only that you absolutely, positively want to play on a beach. Or hike in the mountains. Or be within striking distance of some first-rate golf courses. That's a perfect time to check out Deal Finder, a tool from the smart folks at FareCompare.com. Deal Finder helps you find cheap flights from your home airport to destinations based on your interests.
The upside: This tool reminded us in some ways of Airfarewatchdog.com, one of our all-time favorite fare-finding sites, in that both sites suggest destinations you might not have otherwise considered based on flight prices from your home airport. But while Airfarewatchdog.com simply pumps out a roster of airfares to a list of cities, Deal Finder goes one step further. After plugging in your departure airport, you click on a category, such as "Family Fun Destinations" or "The Great Outdoors," and Deal Finder generates anywhere from 15 to 30 filtered suggestions, ranked in order of airfare price, from least expensive to most expensive.
The downside: When we tested Deal Finder, the results tended to focus on major destinations without any surprises, and in some categories we thought the cities were too skewed toward regional pockets. (In comparison, one of the aspects we love most about Airfarewatchdog.com is that it pulls a wide variety of off-beat destinations and smaller-sized airports into the mix.) With Deal Finder, the roster of "Family Fun Destinations" was a mixed bag of all the big-name usual suspects, with everything from Orlando to Cody, Wyoming, to San Diego. (Read: Fun but expected.) Inexplicably, the "Great Outdoors" category steered us firmly west (Colorado, Montana, New Mexico), while seemingly dismissing the myriad natural beauty spots east of the Rockies that were closer (with presumably less-expensive airfare) to the New York-based departure airport we were using in our test.
Verdict: Deal Finder is a solid addition to your arsenal of money-saving travel tools. It's intuitive and fast and we love that it churns out solid destination ideas while making it a snap to gauge and compare airfares to different cities. While it's not likely to give you any out-of-the-box suggestions, it can surely play a useful part in your travel-planning process.
Note: If you have yet to discover FareCompare.com, take some time to explore it. The site is a gold mine of helpful information about flying and advice on how to find great deals.
