Searching for travel websites

Dear PropellerHeads: I have a job again and am looking forward to my first vacation. Any new websites in the travel area?

A: "New" is relative, especially when it comes to websites. "New" traditionally meant anything in the last few months, but nowadays it can be measured in days (or weeks if you push me). Unfortunately, I don't know of anything new in the modern sense, but I do know some that are new in the traditional sense.

When it comes to travel, most people use expedia.com, orbitz.com or travelocity.com. These three aren't going away anytime soon and figure to be the "Big Three" for some time to come.

More savvy travelers might utilize kayak.com, which not only searches directly with individual airlines, hotels and rental car sites, but also searches Expedia, Orbitz, priceline.com, hotwire.com and cheapoair.com to boot. What I like about Kayak is that they don't sell anything themselves, but direct you to the site that will. This gives some impression of non-bias, which I don't get with the Big Three.

If you want to go somewhere, anywhere, at anytime, check out skyscanner.com. Simply enter where you want to depart from, leave the destination blank, and be as specific on the date as you want to be. You get back a list of destinations and lowest fares to those destinations, from as close as the next state, or as far away as Zimbabwe. I used this site regularly while living in Europe and it discovered some great deals to Istanbul and Dubrovnik. Nothing new in those places; they are perpetually awesome.

A relatively new site called hipmunk.com offers one of the greatest improvements in flight-shopping that I've seen. Their "Agony Index" uses some magical formula that combines price, flight duration and duration of layovers. You can sort results by price, number of stops and departure or arrival times, but it's mostly graphical interface makes picking out desirable flights an actual pleasure.

In fact, the whole Hipmunk interface comes off as very clean and intuitive. They actually do some of the choosing for you by hiding flights that are longer or more expensive than other options in the list. Who wants to pay more for their own torture, right? Instead of scrolling through dozens of pages of results, you get one page containing a couple dozen matches. Hipmunk is certainly "hip."

Alas, the holy grail of airfare sites does not exist, or at least I don't know about it. What I want is a website that will factor in baggage and other hidden fees piled on by the airlines. So in addition to entering the when, where and how many people, they ask me how many bags and factor known fees into the results. Seems "fare" to me.

Turning to hotels, in addition to the above sites and hotels.com, be sure to give booking.com a gander. There are two things I like about it. First, it seems to include a greater pool of hotels than the other sites do, especially for Europe, where there are more regional chains and mom-and-pop accommodations.

Second, booking.com seems to have more information about additional costs. It often indicates if there are additional fees (and how much they are) for breakfast, the gym, Internet, parking and pets. Hotel Cheapskate might seem cheaper at first, but Hotel PropellerHead could be the better deal.

Finally, I always plug TripAdvisor.com. I use this site religiously when picking hotels and restaurants. It often contains tips on how to beat the crowds at popular attractions. You can see the reviews by yours truly at www.tripadvisor.com/members/GracyInVienna. That, at least, should be "new" to you.

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