Who doesn’t need a vacation?

However, if you’re one to procrastinate, spontaneous by nature, or planning ahead for post season travel, there are many new online travel sites that can save you money and help you plan and organize your travel.

The following 4 web sites make traveling easier and cheaper. The travel sites we are recommending are based on sites we find useful, not on popularity.

Farecast predicts if fares on most domestic routes will go up or down. Enter your itinerary and Farecast will tell you if you should buy your ticket now or if a better fare is probably on the way. The site analyzes past fare trends in airline databases and other factors to make its predictions. Farecast also offers predictions for hotel rates in 30 cities.

If choice is what you are seeking, then Kango is your one stop shop. Kango brings together more than 400,000 sites lodging, activity, and destination options and 18 million reviews, ratings, and blogs from all over the web. It makes it easy for you to find everything you need in one place. Kango manages to add a new twist to search travel as their results are based on what type of trip you’re looking to take. Their semantic search engine, which focuses narrowly on travel, parses the language in reviews, guides, and categorizes them by generating tags. For example, hotels that have been reviewed with words like, “perfect, relaxing, couples, or honeymoon,” would rank higher in a search for romantic travel, while hotels associated with the words, “kitchen, pool, and kids,” would rank high in a search for family trips. This is a great site for the indecisive who can’t figure out what or where they want to go.

If you’re lodging situation is the most important part, then check out Pick Pack Go, which lives up to its catchy name. They’ve created a specialized vacation rental search site that makes it fast and easy for travelers to find the ideal vacation rental for the dates they want, and then conveniently and securely book their rental. Pick Pack Go’s goal is to simplify the process of finding, comparing, and renting vacation homes. Unlike a classified listing site, they invite owners and property managers to list as many properties as they like for free. They basically work as the middle man on their behalf to showcase their properties and deliver highly qualified inquiries and bookings.

Once you’ve you already decided where you’re going and how you’re going to get there, you’ll definitely want to head over to Tripit, which is an extremely useful application for frequent and occasional travelers alike. Tripit is simple to use and keeps you well organized. The only leg work you have to do is forward confirmation airline tickets, hotel reservations, car rentals, etc. Their system then extracts relevant information to build an organized itinerary for you. It allows you to send emails in any order, for multiple trips, you get it. It sorts everything out for you into one neat document. An awesome feature is that you don’t even need to register to start using it. Just take an email and forward it to plans@tripit.com, and if it can’t read the info, you can just manually enter the info directly onto the website.

So no matter where you are going, how you’re going to get there, where you’re going to stay, and when (or if!) you’re coming back, turn to online travel sites to help you out. Planning a trip can seem overwhelming, but not if you look for some online support!

This entry was posted on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 6:24 pm and is filed under Where Would I Be Without Friends and Family?... A Vacat. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.