Travel Sites and Tools

Being that I travel about every week, and I am in the technology field - I often am exposed to new technologies and sites, many around the travel industry. As I come across functional, useful, or just outright cools tools I will post them in this entry:

Yapta, www.yapta.com

Dream up an itinerary. Enter in the necessary information and tag it to your My Trips •from here on out, Yapta will keep track of any time that travel package price changes.

You can decide how much you want to be notified of; for instance, you don't have to get tipped off unless the price change is above a certain dollar amount. It's a great way to keep track of airfare changes without having to, you know, actually do anything.

FARECAST, http://www.farecast.com

Farecast was recognized as one of Web 2.0's "Best Travel Sites," one of PC World's 20 Most Innovative Products, "Best of What's New" by Popular Science, one of TIME Magazine's "50 Coolest Websites" and one of the "Best Trip Planning Tools" by Business Week readers.

Airfare - the airfare prediction shows if fares are rising or dropping. Based on the prediction, Farecast will provide a recommendation to buy now or buy later.

Hotels - The Rate Key™ indicates whether or not today's rate for a specific hotel is a deal. It compares an individual hotel's current rate found to its observed historical rates.

Airfarewatchdog.com, www.airfarewatchdog.com

It may seem obvious, but this site does a lot of behind the scenes work to ensure that the fare being shown is the actual lowest available fare with an available seat and not just the lowest available fair.

SideStep, www.sidestep.com

Another big award winner. Sidestep also does deep searching through, but also has forged alliance with major travel marketers to bring unique pricing options to its user base of 6 million per month.