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Top 10 Up and Coming Travel Web Sites You Ought to Know About

Travel Resources

This list is not intended to inform you about the big established travel sites like TripAdvisor or Kayak, but rather to help you find great travel sites that may be new to you. The following travel sites are great resources for travel planning, fare comparison, travel booking and trip organization.

10. Yapta – Who reads fine print? Well, apparently the folks at Yapta do, because they know that many airlines have something called a Guaranteed Airfare Rule. This policy basically says that if an airline lowers the price of your ticket (same exact flights and fare class) after you purchase it directly from them, they owe you a refund (usually a voucher for future service). Some airlines have a reissuance charge of $100 or more while others do not charge anything. Where does Yapta come in? Yapta provides a fee-free monitoring service for the airlines listed below to let you know if you become eligible for a voucher and how to go about getting it.
- AirTran
- Alaska Airlines
- American Airlines
- Continental Airlines
- Delta Airlines
- Frontier Airlines
- JetBlue Airlines
- Midwest Airlines
- United Airlines
- US Airways

9. Farecast – Don’t know when to buy your ticket? Worried fares will go up, but hope that they will go down? Try Farecast’s free airfare prediction software. You tell them where and when you want to travel, and they let you know what is likely to happen to fares on this route in the future by crunching historical fare data and considering a variety of current factors. Microsoft acquired Farecast in April 2008, but they aren’t forcing you to buy Windows Vista to use the service (yet).

8. Triporati – Looking for help deciding where you should go? Triporati has created a very cool free recommendation engine that lets you enter your interests (e.g., art, nightlife) and what activities you are seeking (e.g, snorkeling, golf) and then matches these preferences against a proprietary database of attributes by destination. You can then filter the results by geography helping you find an ideal destination to visit to do the things you love. The destination data is populated and managed by travel experts rather than any so called “wisdom of the crowd.”

7. Hotel Chatter – Hotel Chatter is a great resource for hotel information. It has user reviews of hotels as a good alternative to TripAdvisor, but I read it for the endless stream of articles written by its editorial team. They cover hotel news, trends and gossip and share their random missives. They are a knowledgeable and witty group. You may use the site as a resource for planning a trip, but I recommend you read it just for fun. Their sister site Jaunted is also entertaining. They consider it to be pop-culture travel guide. It reads much like Hotel Chatter just less hotel-y and more celeb-y. Media giant and luxury travel expert Conde Nast purchased these blogs recently, but appear to be letting it operate largely on its own.

6. TripIt – TripIt helps you organize your travel. Once you book part of your trip from major travel sites, you simple email your booking to plans@tripit.com. TripIt then automatically organizes your travel information into a schedule and emails it back to you along with related information (weather, maps, link to your itinerary etc.) You can also get the information at any time by visiting the site or emailing a command to the site and getting an email back to your mobile or other device. Is this the end of my green folder of miscellaneous travel papers?

5. Momondo – This young Danish company has developed a great tool to allow you to search for flights across many different sites. Their tools seem easy enough to use, but the reason it is on this list is not because of the user interface but because it works. Momondo can help you to find lower fares than other flight comparison engines.

4. Seatguru – This site offers great information to travelers on passenger seats on commercial flights and other in-flight amenities. Simply select the airline and aircraft, and you’ll see a breakdown of seats with info on legroom and recline. This service is really handy to use in a second window when booking your seat online. You can see what seats are open on the flight you are going to take and then quickly assess which are good.

3. Nile Guide – This site has aggregated content from a bunch of other travel sites and supplemented it with some of their own to help you build a custom travel guide. Select a destination and then research by category (e.g., things to see and do, nightlife, food etc.). Every time you see something of interest, click the “+” sign next to it and it will become part of your custom travel guide. You can then share and print your travel guide freeing you from carrying a bulkier guidebook or a bunch of miscellaneous papers. The site is young and improving but is neat already.

2. Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush – Do you dread packing? Are you afraid you are going to forget to pack things or do things before you leave? Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush provides a free service to help you create and monitor your departure and packing list. You tell them when where you’re going, and they’ll give you lists of what need to pack and things you need to consider before you go like turning off the heat. The packing lists are comprehensive and well organized (e.g., electronics, cosmetics, clothes for her) and undoubtedly will help make your luggage a bit heavier. You can check items on their online list as you pack them and add custom items. Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush will even email you reminders as your trip approaches.

1. Perfect Escapes - Here at Perfect Escapes, we specialize in luxury travel. We provide a great selection of luxury hotels (top 1% worldwide), great savings (in the form of best rate guarantees and exclusive offers) and great service (our professional travel planners are accessible to you via phone and email and we have 24/7 service). Our editorial team has hand-selected each hotel on our site to save you the work of having to decide which four-star hotels are worth considering – we like to say we’re “all needle, no haystack.” And, our user reviews are from other like-minded travelers.

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