Well, at least they are new to me.
Travel sites pop up on the Internet like spring daisies after a wet winter. I always keep my eye open for new favorites. Here’s the short list of my Top Five New-To-Me Travel Sites.
1. Do-Hop. How can you not like a name that conjures up images of hopping from place to place- and having somebody routing you on? Do-hop is a lightening fast search engine for cheap airline tickets and flights. It searches about 600 airlines around the world. A search for hotels and even a travel guide section are bonuses.
2. Ruba Travel. A picture is really worth a thousand words. And if you’re like me, you can often see pictures of a place and think “Man, I have to go there”. Well, Ruba is your site! Ruba is a collection of photo travel guides, put together by real travelers. And some of these photos are stunners! The best part? Each photo is linked to a Google map, so you can see exactly where it is. Why not sign up and make your own Ruba guide?
3. SimonSeeks.com. They bill themselves as the “You Tube of Travel.” It’s a travel guide site written by travelers, celebrities and journalists. They submit quality stories and users rate them-the higher up the chain, the more the writer gets paid. Writers categorize their stories to make it easy for the reader to find what they are looking for. You could enter “Churches in Rome” rather than just Rome to read what your interested in. You can filter your results further by budget. The site partners with many big name travel sites- so you can even book right from the site!
4. Oyster Hotel Reviews. This new site strives to compete with the big boys like Frommers, Fodors and TripAdvisor. A team of full-time journalists, take scads of pictures, sleep in the beds, talk to other guests staying there and then report back. Instead of tiny snippets of info, you get more like a magazine length feature. And each hotel reviewed has a small overview with a gorgeous photo and a short pro and con list. The best part- it’s all impartial. Reporters pay for their rooms! And no red carpet treatment- hotel managment doesn’t even know they are coming.
5. Bing. It’s a Microsoft product. But let’s overlook that unfortunate fact and give them a chance. Bing is calling itself a decision search engine (huh?). It offers airfare and hotel reservation tools, but also brings in the addition of travel news and info. It looks (and feels) an awful lot like Kayak and Farecast, but some have reported that Bing has returned lower fares than the others. It’s worth playing around with it- especially if it saves you some cash in the end.
Have you tried any of these new sites? Share you thoughts! Or tell us about a new travel site that I haven’t mentioned.