Travel Tips @us | Transfercar Blog

Car relocation + one-way flight = great return trip!

Combining a free relocation car with a cheap one-way flight is the way to go if you want to save both time and money!

The good news for car relocators is that Jetstar has just announced that it’s now going to fly from Auckland to Napier, Nelson, Palmerston North and New Plymouth! The new competition between Air New Zealand and Jetstar airlines – previously restricted to the destinations of Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Queenstown – will bring air fares down for a range of regional destinations, including Nelson-Wellington flights which will follow early next year.

So what does this mean to you? It means you can now easily book our relocations from the regional cities to Auckland such as for instance Napier to Auckland or Palmerston North to Auckland! Grab a cheap flight to get there and come back with a free rental!

We recommend that you check our website regularly and subscribe to our email alerts for your favourite routes and combine this with an airfare sale for a truly cheap and fast return trip.

Campers, motorhomes, high-tops… the rental jargon explained!

Australia and New Zealand have pretty much the same kinds of campers and motorhomes as anywhere else overseas. However, depending on where you intend to travel and what you need from your relocation , it’s a good idea to know what each type of vehicle looks like and what extras they come with.

Before we start, here’s a little glossary of terms or rental jargon that will help you out:

Berth: for example 2 berth. The berth quantity indicates the legal number of passengers the vehicle can sleep and also generally indicates how many seat belts are available.

High-top: A vehicle with a fixed, extended roof.

Pop-top: A vehicle with an extended roof that must be manually folded out or up.

Campervan or camper: Has sleeping and cooking facilities.

Campervan compact: Smaller campers that look like a Toyota Previa or similar.

Motorhome or RV: Has sleeping and cooking facilities as well as a shower, toilet and hot water.

Continue reading Campers, motorhomes, high-tops… the rental jargon explained!

Tasmania, Wild by Nature

Tasmania, Wild by Nature

Transfercar regularly has free campervan relocations from Sydney and Brisbane to Hobart in Tasmania, and this comes with free ferry and insurance… What are you waiting for?

Tasmania is a nature lover’s paradise. With some of the cleanest air in the world according to climate experts, it’s the perfect place to take a breather from our urban lives and get lost in raw beauty. Did you know that 45% of the island is protected by law as national and regional parks?

Tasmania is seemingly made for a driving holiday where you can visit multiple parks, stop at vineyards and farms and taste great local food. Being a compact island, it’s easy to access its many diverse environments – from alpine ranges and grasslands to beaches and rainforests. From short forest trails leading to waterfalls to multi-day walks with no one else in sight, the island also offers plenty of opportunities to stretch your legs. These are some of Tasmania’s must-dos:

Cradle Mountain

Cradle Mountain is part of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area and one of the most beautiful and popular places in Tasmania. It is surrounded by serene glacial lakes, old-growth rainforest, and unusual alpine vegetation.

The National Park is home to many great walks, including Dove Lake and the Overland Track, a magnificent six-day walk through the heart of some of the world’s finest mountain terrain.

It’s easy hiking here, with a boardwalk for much of the route, but it’s still spectacular.

Freycinet National Park

Aim to spend at least two days here, exploring and hiking the area. Situated on Tasmania’s beautiful east coast, Freycinet National Park is a long strip of land that looks out to the Tasman Sea from the eastern side and back towards the Tasmanian coastline from the west.

The park is full of natural assets, including the granite peaks of the Hazards that dominate the Peninsula, abundant birdlife and the iconic and much-photographed Wineglass Bay.

The East Coast

A road trip along the East coast is definitely worth it. The East coast is home to a lot of ridiculously beautiful beaches, and you won’t find a single person on them. Plan to spend three times as much time driving as your GPS predicts, and stop off at all of the beaches, as each one offers something special.

St Helens/ Bay of Fires

The St Helens area has some incredible beaches. Binalong Bay is the star of the show here, but if you really want to be alone, drive a few minutes along the coast and you’ll be rewarded with some gorgeous beaches.

Convinced now? See you there!

Uluru, the jewel of Australia’s Red Centre

Uluru (also known as Ayers Rock) is the world’s largest monolith or rock formation. Situated in Australia’s Northern Territory, and set amongst the awe inspiring Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park, this enormous Sandstone wonder stands 348 metres tall and 9.4 km in circumference with two thirds existing below the ground.

The rock undergoes dramatic color changes with its normally terracotta hue gradually changing to blue or violet at sunset to flaming red in the mornings as the sunrises behind it.

This spectacular creation is an Australian icon and major tourist attraction, enticing thousands of travellers with its magical hues that change from fiery red to delicate mauve, blue, pink and brown, and when there’s rainfall the entire rock turns an amazing silver.

Kata Tjuta and Uluru are the two major features of Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park which is listed as a World Heritage Site. The surrounding area is an ancient sacred place for the Anangu (local Aboriginal) people and is home to a plethora of springs, waterholes, rock caves and ancient paintings made over many thousands of years by the Anangu.

In 1985 the entire area was handed back to its indigenous owners and its sights reassumed their traditional names. The climb to the top is a treacherous 1.6 kilometre, 1 mile climb and climbers follow a track that is both ancient and sacred to the Anangu people. Visitors to the site are therefore asked to respect the area by preferably choosing the trails around and near Uluru and not by climbing it.

If you are planning a road trip in one of Transfercar’s free relocation vehicles and want to stop off at Uluru then you will be looking at relocating between Adelaide and Alice Springs or further. As relocation are more often picked up and dropped off in major towns these are the two most likely destinations for this venture.

7 websites that could change the way you travel

True, there are tons of travel websites out there, and sometimes it seems like it’s only worth our time checking the giants in that space: TripAdvisor, Booking.com, Airbnb, Kayak… who isn’t addicted to those already? The good news is that among the thousands of travel websites and apps, there are a handful of interesting ones that are still worth our time. They can actually help you travel smarter. Here are some of our favourite new ideas.

1. Oyster

This has to be one of our favourites. Oyster (pictured above) is the only hotel site that sends special investigators to visit, photograph, review, and rate each hotel. It is especially handy to have a look at the detailed photos of each room to see which one to choose. There’s usually more information of this type there than on Tripadvisor. Oyster have gained quite a reputation with their photo fakeouts, where they reveal the reality behind the glossy pictures of the travel brochures. Hilarious and useful.

2.TripExpert

This website is like the anti-TripAdvisor: TripExpert offers hotel reviews from travel pros. Yes, travel pros like in the good old days, not just regular travellers. The company has partnered with 20+ travel guide services such as Frommer’s, Conde Nast Traveller, Lonely Planet, Fodors Travel and Travel + Leisure. In a sense, it’s like Rotten Tomatoes (the website specialised in film reviews) for travel.

The website displays a “TripExpert Score”, calculated by a number of parameters including rating and review given by each travel guide partners, and also the number of travel guides that have written about a hotel. It is a good addition to Tripadvisor when you’re in doubt or when you want to narrow down your search. Useful.

3. Roomer

roomer Here’s a useful website if you love getting great hotel deals, and who doesn’t? Their tagline is: ‘’Book your hotel room from people who can’t use theirs!’’ What does that mean? It is allowing travellers who are unable to use their hotel room to list it at a discounted price, thus giving people a chance to grab a last-minute deal. The problem is, though, when you browse the website, it’s hard to tell if you’re getting a regular discount or if you’re getting a special deal. As more people start to use the website, the deals will get better we think…

4.VoulezVousDiner.com

Voulezvousdiner

VoulezVousDiner is a peer-to-peer reservation service that allows users to connect and share meals in each other’s homes. Think Airbnb for restaurants. Instead of going to a restaurant, get an authentic experience of eating some delicious home-made food prepared by a talented local.

Mealsharing.com, Vizeat.com and Eatwith.com are similar websites, and some of them actually vet the quality of the chefs. Like any marketplace, local chefs are then reviewed by the community. We think this concept is going to become big some day, but right now all those websites are struggling to have an interesting offer outside of the most touristy cities in the world like Paris, London and New York. Hopefully the offer will get bigger soon.

5. Triptuner

Deciding where to go isn’t always easy. With so many appealing destinations in the world, how do you choose? Pictures help, obviously, but a website that helps you understand which destinations are suited to your needs is helpful too. That’s what Triptuner does: the website is designed to inspire you. Define if you’d rather have a bikini or a parka holiday, or if you’d rather have a relaxing or active holiday, and Triptuner will find the destination that’s right for you. Frankly, the website could be improved with more settings and better results, but the idea is fun.

6. Adioso

Adioso

‘’Flight search reinvented for humans’’. Indeed, Adioso is really helpful when you want to fly to a region but don’t necessarily know all the airports name there, and when you are quite flexible on the dates. You can type in a request such as, ‘Auckland to San Francisco leaving next week under $2,000’ and see what comes up, and you can choose a data range. The website is intuitive, fun to use and nicely designed, with the same prices that you would find on other meta-search websites. Interesting.

GetyourGuide

getyourguide

GetYourGuide is a booking platform for tours and activities, and to most of the world’s best attractions. It claims to have more than 27,000 things to do. Here you can book tickets for experiences as diverse as visiting the top floor of famous skyscrapers, bus city tours, and whale-watching tours. It can be convenient in some crowded destinations as it enables you to skip the line, and it comes with a best price guarantee.

New Zealand Winter: Skiing, snowboarding and extreme fun

People travel from all over the world to ski in New Zealand and it’s not surprising why.

Blessed with snow kissed mountains that stand as high as 3,700 metres and huge volcanoes covered with fresh powder, New Zealand is a ski and snowboarding paradise.

The ski season starts around mid-June and closes around the beginning of October, offering 4 months of play time for the serious and not so serious riders.

Slopes range from the totally novice to extreme black diamond skill levels and if you want that something special, heli-skiing will take you to remote slopes and glaciers far from the reach of road transport.

What’s even better is what the French call apres-ski. When your body needs a bit of a rest from the slopes, the local resort towns of Queenstown and Wanaka nearby the ski-fields offer anything from a blast in a jet boat, a swing from a bungy or a night out at one of the many bars and clubs that pump until the small hours of the morning.

Here’s a little run-down of some of the best ski fields on offer: Continue reading New Zealand Winter: Skiing, snowboarding and extreme fun