Traditional online travel planning and flight-booking sites like Expedia or Orbitz are still strong although their traffic is slowly lowering in relative terms compared to web based applications with a touch of Web 2.0. User generated content, social networking features, blogs, use of google maps, collaborative planning, tagging, RSS feeds and similar innovations changed the way we travel. So what are the best travel web sites
WAYN (Where Are You Now) is a social networking web site with 4 million members where you can log your trips, see who’s where or make new friends. Users are able to create a profile and upload photos, search for others and link them to their profiles as friends. Since this service is designed for travelers, members are able to search for contacts based on a particular location. Using a world map, it enables a user to visually locate where hisher contacts are situated around the world.
Wikipedia buzz has influenced also travel industry. Wikitravel is a project to create a free, complete, up-to-date, and reliable world-wide travel guide. It uses wiki model to create the guide and is built collaborative by travelers from around the world. Articles cover any level of geographic specificity, from continents to districts of a city, and wikitravel has become useful resource for travelers. Similar service is World66, which is an open content travel guide, where people from all over the planet can write about the places they love, the hotels they stayed in, or the restaurants in which they have eaten. Every part of the travel guide can be edited directly, and you can change the info you find, do a write up, add a complete city or just a bar or a restaurant. Service also generates a map of the world showing which countries you’ve traveled to in your life.
If you are looking for innovative travel search engine, you should check Kayak. It is a travel search engine and is considered as a meta-search engine which searches hundreds of other websites in real time for the best travel deals available. Kayak lets you look at a full range of airlines, hotels and car rental agencies quickly and efficiently based on the criteria you select. Kayak does not sell tickets or book hotels but is looking for best rates and provides you with links to travel agents where you can book a flight or an accommodation.
One of my favorite start ups is farecaster, which is the first airfare prediction website. They help online travel shoppers save money by answering the question; should you buy now or wait In beta version, they offer airfare predictions from over 55 U.S. departure cities to top domestic destinations. They use data-mining algorithms to search for patterns, in the accumulated airfare data, which are associated with significant price changes. These patterns are represented and stored in models, and the models are then rigorously trained. Once created and trained, they use these models to predict the future. Then, current airfares can be scored by the model to answer the question, is the price going up or down in the future
