Hi!
We just booked our vacation and felt the need to share our experience as a reminder that if you start to book your summer vacation within the next few weeks, try to choose a European toolset!
So, what did we use, and how was the experience?
First, we searched for flights.
We used skyscanner.at and kiwi.com to search for flights from Austria to our chosen destination.
We did not book our flight via those, however, but directly with a European airline we found through them.
Ok, the flight looks good. Now, accommodation. Typically we are hotel vacation people, but this time we decided to go for an apartment + rental car. We hope it's a bit more adventurous, and we get to see more beautiful places and meet nice people.
So we searched for apartments via hometogo.at and holidu.at.
We found quite a lot of super nice apartments on both and ultimately decided on one on HomeToGo and booked it directly with them. The process was super smooth, just as one would expect.
So the flight is done, and we also have somewhere to sleep. Now, how to get there?
We used check24.at (mietwagen.check24.at) and europcar.at to search for rental cars. Europcar is only one provider, while Check24 is a comparison portal that searches for the best offers.
We ended up booking a car from a Spanish car rental company through Check24. Again, so far, the process was flawless, and I felt very well informed about insurance and everything else I needed to pay attention to.
And that's it; the only thing left is how to get to the departure airport. We haven't decided yet on that, however.
One major drawback: almost all of them allow payment via PayPal, credit card, or SEPA Direct Transfer (which is just not comparable to the payment protection the others give).
That's really a bummer, as still, through the use of credit cards/PayPal, the money does not solely stay in Europe. That's such a pity.
I do hope the payment problem is solved soon via the digital euro or possibly WERO or other alternatives.
Other than that, we are super happy with how the process went and are looking forward to our vacation this year :)
If you have any tips for former hotel vacation people who just switched to trying out apartment + rental car, let me know. I'm grateful for advice from experienced people on this matter. :)
One more thing: While checking out the area, we used mapy.com, and for navigation during our vacation, I already downloaded www.comaps.app for offline navigation. :)
And for correcting this post, I used languagetool.org (but I stop now to not go off-topic ๐).
Hyperscalers always boast about uptime, fail over, resilience, etc etc. The thing is, the majority of customers using the hyper scalers as is actually do not get those guaranteed at all.
If really wanted to have them, you'd need to pay a hefty premium contractually as well as on how your infra is managed, effectively tripling or more your infra cost, not accounting for additional cost for good SLA response times, getting access to real knowledgeable support staff, ...